Qiang language, called Rma (尔玛) or Rme by its speakers, is a Sino-Tibetan language cluster of the Qiangic branch spoken by approximately 140,000 people in north-central Sichuan Province, China.
Qiang | |
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Ethnicity | Qiang people |
Geographic distribution | Sichuan Province |
Linguistic classification | Sino-Tibetan
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Subdivisions | |
Glottolog | qian1264 |
Qiang consists of:
In 2017, the Rma script, invented by Wei Jiuqiao (魏久乔), was officially finalized and has been accepted by many Qiang people as the first ever official writing system for their language. There is no published information as to whether the script is compatible with both the Northern Qiang language and the Southern Qiang language or if it is only compatible with one of the languages. The writing system has also been given a preliminary proposal to encode it to the Universal Character Set of Unicode.
a /a/ | ae /æ/ | ea /e/ | u /u/ | e /ə/ | nn /◌̃/ |
i /i/ | ü /y/ | o /o/ | /ʔ/ | r /ʴ/ | — |
Sims (2016) gives the following classification for the "Qiangish" (or "Rma") languages, which include Northern Qiang and Southern Qiang. Individual dialects are highlighted in italics.
Sims (2017) reconstructs tones for Proto-Rma (alternatively called Proto-Qiangish), proposing that the lack of tones in Northern Qiang is due to Tibetan influence. High tones and low tones are reconstructed for Proto-Rma, as well as for Proto-Prinmi.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Qiang language, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
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