Namuyi language


Namuyi is a poorly attested Tibeto-Burman and more specifically Naic language of Sichuan and Tibet. It has also been classified as Qiangic by Sun Hongkai and Guillaume Jacques. The eastern and western dialects have low mutual intelligibility. In Sichuan, it is spoken in Muli County and Mianning County. The language is endangered and the number of speakers with fluency is decreasing year by year, as most teenagers do not speak the language, instead speaking the Sichuan dialect of Chinese.

Geographical distribution

Namuyi is a language spoken in the following 4 villages of southern Sichuan:
It is also spoken in Muli and Yanyuan of the Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture and Jiulong County in the Ganzi Autonomous Prefecture.

Dialects

The Namuyi language is subdivided into two different dialects, the dialect of spoken by the people around Muli, and the dialect of those spoken in Mianning. The dialects differ mainly in phonology, where the Mianning and Yanyuan dialect have few consonant clusters as opposed to the Mianning and Xichang dialect.

Phonology

There are 40 single-consonant initials in the Namuyi language. Namuyi also has ten phonemic vowels, /i/ for , /e/ for , /ɛ/ for , /ɨ/ for /ʉ/ for , /ə/ for , /a/ for , /u/ for , /o/ for , and /ɔ/ for . There is no phonological vowel length, though speakers can lengthen a vowel in the first syllable at times to emphasize a word.