A Study Of Tu Languages And Their Changes In A Multilingual Environment

Based on theories of sociolinguistics,language contact,and linguistic typology,this paper focuses on the language use,cultural characteristics,and changes of the Qinghai Huzhu Tu ethnic group in a multilingual environment.By describing the social attributes and linguistic elements of the mutual assistance Tu and Chinese dialects,we further investigate the use and functional evolution of different languages in the Tu language community.In this study,Tuguan village,Dongjia village and Duoshidai village in Huzhue multi-language community were chosen as samples to comprehensively investigate the villagers'language ability,language use and characteristics of their language identity.According to the investigation,people from different places and groups have obvious differences in language use.Tu language in Tuguan village remains the best,followed by Dongjia village.However,it is in serious decline and even undergoes intergenerational fault in Duoshidai village.The villagers' ability and usage of Huzhu dialect and Putonghua is contrary to that of the Tu,and Duoshidai villagers show the highest level of Putonghua ability.Accordingly,the functions of different languages in the Tu language community have changed significantly with the development of the society.The main manifestation is that the Tu language community has broken its original monolingual system and basically formed the Tu language and Chinese bilingual system.Young people have had the ability to use national common language.Huzhu Tu ethnic group has a strong sense of identity towards Tu's language and national common language.Because,Tu's language is their mother tongue and ethnic language which is one of the elements for maintaining ethnic emotion and identity.It is also carrier of Tu' s culture and spirit.High identity of national common language is motivated by Tu's desire for development.The ability of national common language is not only what Tu minority must have when they go out but is determined by its strong social functions.Tu's language belongs to the Altaic Mongolian language family and Huzhu dialect is Central area mandarin Qinlong sub-area.Theses two different types of language have produced deep influence on people's language use.Phonologically,the new and old pronunciations have obvious differences,and the instability of duplicated consonants is further increased.This paper discusses the intergenerational differences and changes of six types of Tu's language consonant cluster.First,s is pre-initial,plosive and nasal are post duplicated consonant,for example,sp?sk?sG?sts?sm?sn;second,duplicated consonants consist of retroglossal fricative s and other plosives,nasal.This type of duplicated consonants have sk?sp?st and sn four types in new and old pronunciation.Third,the combination of glossal affrication x with voiceless stop at the base of tongue k and voiced stop of sublingual G.Lingual duplicated consonants are relatively few and only have xk and XG.Fourth,duplicated consonants are composed of nasal consonant,plosive and affricate.The characteristics of this type is pre-consonant pronounced as nasal consonant,such as np?nt?ntsh?nts?nt(?)h?nk and mp.Duplicated consonant of post-nasal is not found.Nasal consonant is instable,and this study mainly discuss initial nasal consonant but not syllable strings in syllable.Fifth,duplicated consonant consists of trill r,plosive,affricate and nasal consonant.Tremolo duplicated consonant is presented as rp/rph?rt?rk?rt(?)and rm in words and our focus is its stability.Sixth,the combination of lingual fricative and tongue affricate.This type only has a“(?)t(?)" sound which is basically stable in old pronunciation but with an added vowel in new pronunciation.This study also generalizes the rule of syllable division of Tu's language and applies it to divide the syllable of 200 core words of Tu's language which is intended to observe its vowel harmony.It finds that vowel correspondence between intergeneration is instable and has had variations.The main vowel harmony is shown as relative free correspondence of a-a?o-o?e-e;i?u?(?)with themselves or other vowels.And the distribution of all monophthong in syllable is instable,free in pre or initial distribution.At present,vowel harmony in words of Tu's language is only a form of vowel harmony remains but not a complete and systematic correspondence rule as other languages of the Altai.Huzhu dialect is influenced by Tu's language and has formed a uniformed type of vocabulary tone category with a high and low distribution of tone value.By analysis,it is concluded that there are four main types of lexical intonation in the two-character group.They are 55-55,13-55,45-31,31-232.These four types of tonal values are only the relative trend of change of words'tone values with tiny difference between high and low.Meanwhile,which proves the existence of Chinese word tones in ethnic areas.The formation of Chinese dialects in multi-ethnic areas is the inevitable result of different types of language contact.In lexical level,this paper first describes the basic word formation in Tu's language,mainly including derivation and combination and still finds that lexical-borrowing has been a major way for enrich its vocabulary.The gradation borrowing of 200 core words in Tu's language is investigated.Old borrowing index in first gradation words is 0.11,new borrowing index is 0.13;Old borrowing index in second gradation words is 0.1 8,new borrowing index is 0.25;second gradation words borrowing rate is obviously higher that the first gradation.The intergenerational borrowing rate is further enlarged and language contact is further deepened with intergeneration moves on.Classified studies of word class and word meaning has been conducted.The differences between old and new usage of generations on word correspondence and gap have been statistically researched on pronouns,kinship address terms,quantifier,verbs,nouns(natural references,animals and plants,food,vegetables,parts of the body,color,time,location,religious,professional term).It demonstrates that the gap between old and young generations on core words of Tu's language is enlarging and the rate of Chinese borrowing words is increasing.In grammatical level,incidental component is the main way to realize its grammar.With the influence of multi-language contact,Tu's language mainly borrows Chinese adverbs,such as“??”,“?”,“?/??”,as well as conjunctions,to enrich its means of grammatical expression.Then,word order type SOV of Huzhu dialect as well as generation and evolution of noun case“?”are discussed.The analysis shows that“?”is noun of locality“?”.The formation of the above special grammar phenomenon of Huzhu dialect is the result of long-term contact between different languages.Meanwhile,its study should be considered in the context of special grammatical phenomenon of Chinese dialects in Hehuang basin or Ganqing region,and more broadened perspective of multi-ethnic language contact should be taken to analyze the characteristics of Chinese dialect grammar in northwest China.Multi-ethnic contact inevitably leads to multi-cultural contact.The Tu all believe in Tibetan Buddhism and further formed its unique belief of "Family God" in commination with Han Taoism system.Naming culture of Tu reflects religious culture.Most child names(nicknames)of Tu ethnic group are given by local lamas or respected elders.Most of these names are using Han family names plus mixed-languages names or directly borrows Han family names,which shows the most obvious traces of cultural contact in the language.Nowadays,Huzhu Tu is the area where Tu's language is maintained best.This paper does a comprehensive and systematic research on Huzhu Tu's language use and changes from the perspective of social linguistics and language contact.It provides a large number of first-hand materials and theoretical considerations for the studies of different ethnic language use,functional relationship evolution and interrelationship of language elements in northwest areas.