Gyalrong languages
Gyalrong or rGyalrong, also rendered Jiarong, or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China.
Name
The name Gyalrong is an abbreviation of Tibetan ཤར་རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང, shar rgyal-mo tsha-ba rong “Eastern Queen’s Fever Ravine”, a historical region of Kham now mostly located inside Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan. This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎 or 嘉荣, jiāróng. It is pronounced by speakers of Situ. It is a place-name and is not used by the people to designate their own language. The autonym is pronounced in Situ and in Japhug. Gyalrong speakers were previously classified as an independent ethnicity but were merged into the Tibetan ethnicity by the Chinese government in 1954.Languages
Based on mutual intelligibility, Gates considers there to be five Gyalrong languages:- Situ or less precisely Eastern Gyalrong
- Japhug
- Tshobdun
- Zbu
- Gyalrong
Most early studies on Gyalrong languages focused on various dialects of Situ, and the three other languages were not studied in detail until the last decade of the 20th century.
The differences between the four languages are presented here in a table of cognates. The data from Situ is taken from Huang and Sun 2002, the Japhug and Showu data from Jacques and the Tshobdun data from Sun.
Gyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features, such as inverse marking, ideophones, and verbal stem alternations. See Situ language for an example of the latter.
Demographics
Gates lists the following demographic information for 5 rGyalrong languages. Altogether, there are about 85,000 speakers for all 5 languages combined.| Language | Speakers | Villages | Dialects | Alternate names | Locations |
| Situ | 35,000-40,000 | 57 | 7+ | rGyalrong, kəru, roŋba | almost entirely in Barkam County; NE Jinchuan County; NW Li County |
| rGyalrong, South-central | 33,000 | 111 | 3+ | rGyalrong, roŋba | Xiaojin, Danba, and Baoxing Counties |
| Japhug | 4,000-5,000 | 19 | 3 townships in NE Barkam County, namely Lóng’ěrjiǎ, Dàzàng, and Shā’ěrzōng | ||
| Tshobdun | 3,000 | 10 | stodpaskʰət | Caodeng/Tsho-bdun Township, Barkam County | |
| Zbu | 6,000+ | 28 | stodpaskʰət | Barkam, Rangtang, Seda, and Aba counties |