Language
The Chinese government recognizes six mutually unintelligible Yi languages, from various branches of the Loloish family:
- Northern Yi (Nuosu 诺苏), Western Yi (Lalo 腊罗), Central Yi (Lolopo 倮倮泼), Southern Yi (Nisu 尼苏), Southeastern Yi (Sani 撒尼), Eastern Yi (Nasu 纳苏).
Northern Yi is the largest with some two million speakers, and is the basis of the literary language. There are also ethnically Yi languages of Vietnam which use the Yi script, such as Mantsi.
Many Yi in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi know Standard Chinese, and code switching between Yi and Chinese is common.
Read more about this topic: Yi People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)