A Study Of The Miao Dialect In Changliu Horn, Qinglong County, Guizhou

Laba Miao people are descendants of soldiers from Hubei and Hunan provinces who came to Guizhou to "open up wasteland and grow food grain".Now Laba Miao people have a population of about 200,000;they inhabit the intersection of Qinglong County,Pu'an County,Liuzhi County,Shuicheng County and Panzhou City on both sides of the upper reaches of Beipan River.Laba Miao dialect is a jun dialect island under the category of southwest mandarin as well as Chinese said by minorities.It has broad sense and narrow senses:Laba Miao dialect in a narrow sense is called "local dialect" by locals,falls into the category of Loushao dialect of Xiang Chinese,and now is endangered;Laba Miao dialect in a broad sense includes what locals call "Hakka dialect" and is a kind of southwest mandarin with elements of the "local dialect" used by Laba Miao people when communicating with people not of the same nationality.This article takes the main settlement of Laba Miao people-Changliu Village,Qinglong County-as survey spot,conducts an in-depth field investigation on Laba Miao dialect in the narrow sense,and hence describes and analyze its pronunciation,vocabulary and grammatical system,to probe into its special linguistic phenomena and reveal its evolving laws.This article is broken down into seven chapters:Chapter 1 is introduction;Chapters 2 and 3 are phonetics;Chapters 4 and 5 are vocabulary;Chapters 6 and 7 are grammar;appendix provides abundant corpus and transcriptions.The introduction first surveys the formation and development course of Laba Miao dialect based on the textual research of pedigrees of clans and families,and analyzes the origin of their dialects.Next,the introduction employs sociolinguistic methods to investigate the endangered Laba Miao dialect from two perspectives-linguistic vitality and linguistic attitude.At last,the introduction sorts out research records of Miao dialect and homogeneous dialects and introduces research content,thinking and methodology of this project.The pronunciation part describes the phonology and syllable features of Laba Miao dialect in Changliu Village,and presents how it evolved from ancient Chinese phonology.Then this part analyzes sandhi of two-word phrases,light tone,changed tone,changed rhyme,combination tone,diminutive tone and other phenomena,and discusses the classification of literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters of Laba Miao dialect,and their historical levels,old pronunciation and new pronunciation and gender differences in speech.The vocabulary part first analyzes the characteristics of the words of Laba Miao dialect that distinguish it from southwest mandarin and Hunanese dialects nearby in terms of word formation,differences in origin and meaning,and cities some typical words on this basis.Then,the part investigates and analyzes some archaic words kept in Laba Miao dialect,and lastly discusses folk culture-related words of Miao dialect and reveals their unique cultural value from multiple sides including costume,diet,wedding,funeral and festival conventions.The grammar part sorts and describes some special grammatical phenomena of Laba Miao dialect in two aspects-morphology and syntax.The morphology part mainly includes word formation,overlapping word formation of nouns,overlapping forms of adjectives,aspectual system and so on;the syntax part mainly includes active sentence,passive sentence,double-object sentence,interrogative sentence,negative sentence,possible sentence and verb compliment sentence.Pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar parts all have corresponding dialectal corpus,including homophony syllabary,classified word list and phonetic example sentences,thus offering facts as support for description and analysis.Appendixes include proverbs,adages,ballads,chants,topic description and transcriptions of the dialogue between three persons,directly presenting pronunciation,words and grammatical phenomena of Laba Miao dialect with living examples.The systematic investigation and research of Laba Miao dialect of Changliu Village,Qinglong County,conducted by this article will enrich the research results regarding endangered Chinese dialects and provides future in-depth study of Chinese used by minorities,dialectal contact,the integration of dialects and culture and other issues with abundant,informative materials.