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:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
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“These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)