The Gyalrongic languages (also known as Rgyalrongic or Jiarongic) constitute a branch of the

Qiangic languages Qiangic (''Chʻiang, Kyang, Tsiang'', Chinese: 羌語支, "''Qiang'' language group"; also Rmaic, formerly known as Dzorgaic) is a group of related languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family. They are spoken mainly in Southwest China, incl ...

Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 ...

, but some propose that it may be part of a larger

Rung languages The Rung languages are a proposed branch of Sino-Tibetan languages. The branch was proposed by Randy LaPolla on the basis of morphological evidence such as pronominal paradigms. However, Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard (2021) argues that the ...

group and do not consider it to be particularly closely related to Qiangic but suggest that similarities between Gyalrongic and Qiangic may be from areal influence. However, other work suggests that Qiangic as a whole may in fact be

paraphyletic Paraphyly is a taxonomic term describing a grouping that consists of the grouping's last common ancestor and some but not all of its descendant lineages. The grouping is said to be paraphyletic ''with respect to'' the excluded subgroups. In co ...

, with the only commonalities of the supposed "branch" being shared archaisms and

areal feature In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a common ancestor or proto-language. An areal feature is contrasted with genetic relatio ...

s that were encouraged by

language contact Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum ...

. Jacques & Michaud (2011) propose that Qiangic including Gyalrongic may belong to a larger Burmo-Qiangic group based on some lexical innovations.

Geographical distribution

The Gyalrongic languages are spoken in

Sichuan Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Cheng ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

, mainly in the autonomous Tibetan and Qiang prefectures of Karmdzes and Rngaba. These languages are distinguished by their conservative morphology and their phonological archaisms, which make them valuable for

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical li ...

. Gyalrongic languages are spoken predominantly in the four counties of Ma'erkang, Li, Xiaojin, and Jinchuan in Aba Prefecture, western

.Nagano, Yasuhiko and Marielle Prins. 2013
rGyalrongic languages database
Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku). Other Gyalrongic lects are spoken in neighboring Heishui, Rangtang, Baoxing, Danba, and Daofu counties.

Classification

The Gyalrongic languages share several features, notably in verbal morphology. More recent classifications such as Lai et al. (2020) split Gyalrongic into West and East branches: *Gyalrongic ** West Gyalrongic *** Khroskyabs (formerly known as ''Lavrung'') *** Horpa (or ''Stau'') *** Tangut ** East Gyalrongic (or ''Gyalrong'' proper) The Gyalrong languages in turn constitute four

mutually unintelligible In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...

varieties: Eastern Gyalrong or Situ, Japhug, Tshobdun, and Zbu. Khroskyabs and Horpa are classified by Lin (1993) as a "western dialect" of Gyalrong, along with Eastern Gyalrong and the "northwestern dialect" (Japhug, Tshobdun, and Zbu). Otherwise, the scholarly consensus deems the distance between Khroskyabs, Horpa, and the Gyalrong cluster is greater than that between the Gyalrong languages. For example, ''Ethnologue'' reports 75% lexical similarity between Situ and Japhug, 60% between Japhug and Tshobdun, but only 13% between Situ and Horpa. Huang (2007:180) found that Horpa (Rta’u) and Gyalrong (Cogrtse) share only 15.2% cognacy, with 242 cognates out of a total of 1,592 words. The Khalong Tibetan language has a Gyalrongic

substratum Substrata, plural of substratum, may refer to: *Earth's substrata, the geologic layering of the Earth *''Hypokeimenon'', sometimes translated as ''substratum'', a concept in metaphysics *Substrata (album), a 1997 ambient music album by Biosphere * ...

. The Chamdo languages (consisting of Lamo, Larong, and Drag-yab, a group of three closely related Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in

Chamdo Chamdo, officially Qamdo () and also known in Chinese as Changdu (), is a prefecture-level city in the eastern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China. Its seat is the town of Chengguan in Karuo District. Chamdo is Tibet's third largest c ...

, eastern

Tibet Tibet (; ''Böd''; ), or Greater Tibet, is a region in the western part of East Asia, covering much of the Tibetan Plateau and spanning about . It is the homeland of the Tibetan people. Also resident on the plateau are other ethnic groups s ...

) may or may not be Qiangic.Suzuki, Hiroyuki and Tashi Nyima. 2018
Historical relationship among three non-Tibetic languages in Chamdo, TAR
''Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (2018)''. Kyoto: Kyoto University.Jacques, Guillaumes. 2016
Les journées d'études sur les langues du Sichuan

Comparison with Tibetic

Gyalrongic languages are surrounded by

Tibetic languages The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descending from Old Tibetan.Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descriptive linguistics of the ...

and have thus been in intense contact with them. However, there many major lexical and morphological differences between them. Gyalrongic tend to use prefixes such as *kə-, *tə-, etc., while Tibetic languages use suffixes such as -pa/-ba, -ma, -po/-bo, -mo, etc. Below is a table of comparing words in bTshanlha and Japhug that do not have cognates in

Classical Tibetan Classical Tibetan refers to the language of any text written in Tibetic after the Old Tibetan period. Though it extends from the 7th century until the modern day (along with Arabic, Ge'ez, and New Persian, it is one of the handful of 'living' ...

References

*Duo Erji ��尔吉 1984. '' A study of Geshezha of Daofu County'' ��孚语格什扎话研究 China Tibetan Studies Press ��国藏学出版社出版 *Gates, Jesse P. 2012.
Situ in situ: towards a dialectology of Jiāróng (rGyalrong)
'. M.A. thesis, Trinity Western University. *Gates, Jesse P. 2014. ''Situ in Situ: Towards a Dialectology of Jiarong (rGyalrong)''. LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 80. Munich: Lincom Europa.

External links

rGyalrongic Languages Database
(CLDF Dataset on Zenodo )
Proto-rGyalrong reconstruction
(Sino-Tibetan Branches Project) {{Na-Qiangic languages Qiangic languages br:Djiarongeg