Investigation And Study. The Town Ning Bigong Gelao Language

Gelao is an ethnic group distributed in the remote areas of Guizhou, Yunnan and Guangxi provinces in southwest China. Gelao people have their own language. Gelao language, the native language of Gelao people, is classified under the Ge-Yang branch of Kam-Tai family. It has four dialects, i.e. Gao dialect, Douluos dialect, A-ou dialect and Hagei dialect. Since 1980's, the Gelao people and their language have attracted more and more attentions of scholars from both ethnological and linguistic fields home and abroad. The Gelao language is now in severe endangerment because of historical and practical reasons.Bigong is a village located in Dingqi township in Zhenning county in the western part of Guizhou province. About one third of the villagers here speak the Gelao language which will surely be extinct in two generations without interference from outside world. Up to now, linguistic data from this language location have not yet been fully released. In this thesis, the present writer gives a general description of some features in phonology, lexical and grammar of the Gelao language spoken here.According to first-hand collected in this location last summer, the Bigong Gelao language has 33 initials, 37 finals and four tones. The initial system is simple, however, it still reserves some consonant clusters (usu. consists of a labial plosive [p] and lateral [1]) and voiced initials, the trill "r" and palatal lateral "l" have not been found in other Gelao dialects. Most of the words are mono-syllabic. According to semantic structure, words can be divided into lexical derivation, compounds ext. Bigong Gelao has borrowed some words from southwestern subdialect of Mandarin Chinese. In the chapter discussing grammar system, the writer describes the features of word class. In the last part, the writer draws a conclusion that the Bigong Gelao should be classified under the A-ou dialect of Gelao according to both phonetic and lexical comparison among data from five locations.The language data of Bigong used here were collected in the fieldtrip I did last summer, which will help to enrich the database of Gelao language. And for the sake of rescuing the endangered language, I hope the paper would be of more academic and social values.