Asian Languages and Linguistics - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2023

Jinghpaw is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northern Burma and adjacent areas of China and India. The language is known for both its conservative nature (e.g., comparative Tibeto-Burman linguistics) and the innovative nature of its speakers (e.g., social anthropology of highland Burma). In view of this duality, this paper explores the Jinghpaw lexicon asking whether it is conservative enough to shed great light on the reconstruction of the proto-language or whether it is innovative, having undergone a grand-scale lexical replacement under intensive contact. This paper addresses this question by measuring the lexical borrowing rate in the language based on the methodology laid out by the Loanword Typology (LWT) project. The results put Jinghpaw among average borrower languages in terms of the borrowability scale of the world’s languages. This study concludes that the Jinghpaw lexicon, especially its basic vocabulary, is relatively conservative, and the semantic fields affected by borrowing are mostly restricted to those that show high cross-linguistic susceptibility to intercultural influences. The results and discussion in this paper enable further understanding of comparative Tibeto-Burman linguistics and contact linguistics of northern Burma and beyond.

Asho Chin (ISO 639-3: csh), also known as Plains Chin, is a Kuki-Chin language spoken mainly in the southwestern areas of Myanmar, where Burmese is the dominant language. This paper presents a qualitative linguistic analysis to explore the similarities between Asho Chin and Burmese. The analysis reveals a significant influence of Burmese on Asho Chin that goes beyond vocabulary to include grammatical features. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of considering both the temporal and geographical context of Burmese loanwords in Asho Chin. The findings suggest that Asho Chin is constantly evolving, largely due to the continued influence of Burmese. This influence is evident in the range of loanwords and linguistic structures in Asho Chin that appear to have resulted from interaction with Burmese.

The Kachin State of Myanmar is home to a variety of ethnic groups, including Kachin, Tai, and Burmese. This is a result of the ethnic migrations and expansions that have occurred in the area. Determining the source language of a village name and plotting it on a map could provide clues to the present and past distribution of the ethnic groups, and also supporting evidence for presumed ethnic migrations and expansions. In this paper, I will outline methods for determining the source languages of village names in Kachin State based on the resources such as descriptions on maps, information gathered through interviews, names of families and clans and so on. I will also present the results of an attempt to plot the source languages on a map at the current stage.

Comparisons of plant names in Karenic languages reveal that names that can be traced back to Proto-Karen belong to plants that grow in temperate zones, such as bamboo, banyan, and mango. The names for coconut and palmyra palm, which are typical tropical plants, cannot be traced back to Proto-Karen and are borrowings. This suggests that Proto-Karen was spoken in a temperate zone. Meanwhile, the highest diversity of Karenic languages is observed in the area from southern Shan State to Kayah State and northern Karen State in Myanmar. Thus, as per linguistic migration theory, this area may have been the homeland of Karenic languages. Furthermore, the area largely has temperate zones. Hence, we can assume that the homeland of Karenic languages was in this area.

This article examines the migration history of Tibetic language-speaking people in the south-eastern corner of the Tibetosphere, particularly the origin of Sangdam Tibetan, spoken in Kachin State, Myanmar, by adopting a geolinguistic approach with linguistic maps. It first presents the current research progress of geolinguistics in the region and then discusses phonological and lexical features to elucidate the dialect position of Sangdam Tibetan based on the data available in its adjacent areas, such as Eastern Tibet and Yunnan in China. In addition, this study highlights the geolinguistic method’s potential and difficulties in addressing migration history.

This article reports on some outcomes of language contact and linguistic convergence involving Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages in the Northeast Indian state of Nagaland. The primary focus falls on Nagamese, a lingua franca of the region that is undergoing a change in its morphosyntactic alignment typology. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that cognitive schemas are most likely responsible for the spread of replicated case marking patterns from local Tibeto-Burman languages to Nagamese, and that this has triggered a change in the alignment pattern of Nagamese over the past fifty years. The data presented in the paper are significant for demonstrating how language contact and the replication of cognitive schemas can be plausible drivers of grammatical change, even for something as fundamental to the syntax of a language as its morphosyntactic alignment.

Rawang and Jinghpaw, while both considered part of the larger Kachin ethnic group, are not seen to be closely related, though both retain proto-Tibeto-Burman forms relatively well. But as essentially all Rawang speakers speak Jinghpaw, there are a lot of loan words from Jinghpaw in Rawang, and there is also some commonality in the structures. This paper looks at the domains in which we find many loanwords and their paths into Rawang, and certain grammatical structures that seem to be either direct loans from Jinghpaw into Rawang, or could be calques on Jinghpaw structures. One such pattern is an adverbial phrase with a reduplicated adverb plus a light verb. There are also two nominalisation constructions that are relatively transparent loans from Jinghpaw.

This paper presents a discussion of contact-induced borrowings and replications in Hyow, a Southeastern South Central (SC) Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Hyow shows two layers of contact-induced changes: an earlier layer under the influence of Burmese, and a more recent layer under the influence of Bangla. The Hyow desiderative -sháng closely resembles the suffix shɔn ‘want to’ in the Burmese variety of Rakhine State, suggesting that Hyow speakers previously lived in Rakhine State. In its current location, Hyow speakers are in contact with Bangla, and the presence of Indo-Aryan type relative-correlative clauses in Hyow – not found in any of the SC languages in Burma – reveals the effect of this recent contact with Bangla. Apart from demonstrating the respective antiquity of Hyow contact with Burmese and Bangla, the two examples of the borrowing of the desiderative suffix -sháng and relative-correlative clauses also show borrowing and replication as two distinct types of contact-induced change (Heine and Kuteva, 2005, 2006). This paper gives the first account of phonological, lexical and grammatical borrowings and replications to understand how language contact has shaped Hyow.