The Qiang language belongs to the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan stock. Some of the characteristics of the Qiangic branch include having a cognate set of direction marking prefixes; quite degenerate, though clearly cognate person marking paradigms; and radical loss of syllable final consonants, but preservation of complex initials and clusters. (Other members of the Qiangic branch include Pumi (Prinmi), Muya, Ergong, Shixing, Namuzi--see Sun 1982, 1983, 1985. rGyalrong is often included in this group as well, though this categorization is less than certain--see LaPolla 2000b, 2003a.)

Sun (1981a:177-78) divides the Qiang language into two major dialects, Northern Qiang and Southern Qiang; (see Wen 1941 for an earlier classification into eight dialects). Qiang speakers living in Heishui County and the Chibusu district of Mao County, including those designated by the Chinese government as Tibetans, are said to be speakers of the Northern dialect. Sun further subdivides the Northern dialect into the Luhua, Mawo, Cimulin, Weigu, and Yadu subdialects. Qiang speakers living in Li County, Wenchuan County, parts of Mao County other than Chibusu, and Songpan County are said to be Southern dialect speakers.

The Southern dialect is also subdivided by Sun into the Daqishan, Taoping, Longxi, Mianchi, and Heihu subdialects. Liu (1998b:17) adds Sanlong and Jiaochang to the list of Southern subdialects. Recent fieldwork as part of the Qiang Dialect Map Project has called into question some aspects of this classification. In particular, dialects in Songpan County and the Sanlong area of Mao County are now considered to be within the Northern dialect area. The dialect situation should become clearer with the completion of the Qiang Dialect Atlas Project.

Until recently there was no writing system for the language. The Qiang carved marks on wood to remember events or communicate. In the late 1980s a team of Qiang specialists from several different organizations developed a .i.writing system; for the Qiang language, based on the Qugu variety of the Yadu subdialect of the Northern dialect. In 1993 the government officially acknowledged the writing system.

The writing system uses 26 Roman letters to represent the 42 consonants and eight vowels in that variety of Qiang. Twenty of the consonants are represented by single Roman letters while the remaining 22 consonants are represented by double Roman letters (the letter r is not used as a single consonant). Five of the vowels are represented by single letters while the other three are represented by double letters. (See The Qiang Script). 

The promulgation of the writing system has not been successful, and one of the main reasons is the complexity of the Qiang sound system and the concomitant complexity of the writing system. It is quite difficult for adult villagers, especially the illiterate peasants, to remember all of the letters and combinations representing different types of consonants and vowels. Another factor is the diversity of Qiang dialects. As the writing system is based on the Qugu variety of the Yadu subdialect of the Northern dialect, those who are not Northern dialect speakers resent learning another variety of the Qiang language in order to read and write (ideally they would eventually be able to write their own dialect, but would learn the script using the Qugu dialect). A third and very important factor is the fact that even if somebody masters the sound system and is able to read and write using the writing system, there are no reading materials available to make what they have learned useful. 

Education in the Qiang areas is all in Chinese, though in recent years there has been a movement to implement bilingual education. Many of the children now can go to school, but the children often have to travel great distances to get to school. They will often live at the school, either for one week at a time, if the school is relatively close, or for months at a time, if it is farther away. Local educators have noticed that even with the opportunity for free education offered by the central government, there has been a continuously high drop-out rate among children from remote villages. One reason, they believe, is that most of the children from the remote villages cannot cope with the school education because teaching in the schools is all in Chinese and they cannot speak Chinese. The call for a bilingual approach in education mainly refers to the use of spoken Qiang as a medium of instruction in the lower grades alongside Mandarin in order to facilitate the learning of Chinese. Another reason for the high drop-out rate is the fact that while schooling is technically free, the schools charge various fees and the cost of room and board, so it can be prohibitively expensive for the villagers.

In general, Chinese has been the main language of education and communication with non-Qiang people. The spoken form of Chinese used is the Western Sichuan subdialect of Southwest Mandarin, while the written form used is that of Standard Modern Chinese. The Qiang have been in contact with the Han Chinese for centuries (see Sun 1998). However, in the past, only the men who left the Qiang area to trade or work or had to deal with Han Chinese on a regular basis would learn Chinese. Children below the age of fifteen rarely spoke Chinese, but now with more universal access to Chinese schooling and to TV (which is all in Standard Modern Chinese), even small children in remote villages can speak some Chinese. Now very few Qiang people cannot speak Chinese, but there are many Qiang who cannot speak the Qiang language. In many villages by the main roads, and in some whole counties in the east of Aba Prefecture (where contact with the Han Chinese has historically been most intense), the entire population is monolingual in Chinese. The tendency toward becoming monolingual in Chinese is becoming more prevalent now than ever before due to strong economic and social pressure to assimilate, and to the popularization of free primary and secondary education in Chinese. The number of fluent Qiang speakers becomes smaller day by day. Qiang is therefore very much an endangered language. The culture of the Qiang people is also in jeopardy of disappearing. This loss of the Qiang language and culture was noted as early as the 1940s (Graham 1958; see also Sun 1988), and accelerated greatly after 1949.

Typological profile

Qiang is a largely agglutinative language, with some phonological processes of vowel harmony, lenition, and morpheme coalescence. Nouns take only a limited number of optional suffixes with restricted distribution, while verbs take up to three prefixes and four suffixes. Except for nominalizing suffixes and the causative suffix, which are derivational, all other verbal affixes are inflectional. Reduplication of verbs is of the whole root, and with active verbs it signifies reciprocal action (and intransitivization) or an iterative sense; with stative verbs it signifies intensification or plurality.

Qiang has a rather complex phonological system, with thirty-seven initial consonants, including voiced and voiceless fricatives at seven different points of articulation and many consonant clusters. Unlike most Tibeto-Burman languages, Qiang has many consonant finals, including clusters, due to the collapsing of two syllables into one (there is a tendency towards monosyllable words).

There are two open lexical classes: nouns, those forms which can take definite marking and number marking, and verbs, those forms which can take the negative prefix and person marking. Adjectives are a subset of the verbs, and can be identified as a set by their semantics and their morphosyntactic behavior. Closed lexical classes include pronouns (including demonstratives, interrogatives, and personal pronouns, classifiers, postpositions, definite/indefinite markers, clause-final particles, and adverbs. Of these the pronouns and classifiers are subsets of the nouns.

Qiang has both head marking and dependent marking. Noun phrases can take enclitic postpositions to show their semantic or pragmatic role in the clause, and there is person marking of an animate actor and/or an animate non-actor on the verb. There is no other agreement marking in Qiang. Qiang has not grammaticalized syntactic relations (i.e. there are no syntactic pivots; see Van Valin & LaPolla 1997, Ch. 6 on this concept); the postpositions and person marking are of the semantically based type discussed in Dixon 1994, Ch. 2. The use of the topic marker, and to some extent the non-actor person marking, are controlled by pragmatic factors. While the word order is generally verb-final, the order of noun phrases is determined by pragmatic factors. Negation precedes the verb, while modal and aspect marking follow the verb.

Within the noun phrase, the noun head can be preceded by a genitive phrase or relative clause, and may be followed by an adjective, a demonstrative pronoun or definite marker, and a numeral plus classifier phrase, in that order.

There are intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs, plus some ambitransitive verbs where the single argument of the intransitive use corresponds to the actor of the transitive use. Transitives can be formed from intransitives, or ditransitives from transitives, by the addition of the causative suffix. There is no intransitivizing marking other than the reduplication that marks the reciprocal. When a verb is part of a predicate (verb complex), it can be preceded by an adverbial, a directional prefix, a negative marking prefix, and an aspectual prefix, and can be followed by the causative suffix, aspectual suffixes, and person marking suffixes. This complex can be followed by clause final particles marking illocutionary force, modality, mood, and evidentials. 

Previous Research on the Qiang Language

Fieldwork on Qiang and initial analyses were first carried out by Wen Yu in the late 1930's (Wen 1940, 1941, 1943a, 1943b, 1943c, 1945). Wen also did some initial comparisons and historical work on the language (1943b, 1947), and published two vocabularies of Qiang (1950, 1951).  Chang Kun (1967) used Wen's data for a comparative study of the southern Qiang dialects, and attempted to reconstruct the proto-language.  In the late 1950's the Academia Sinica (now the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) organized teams of linguists to go to the different areas where ethnic minority peoples lived and carry out fieldwork (see Liu 1998:1-3 for details). Fieldwork was carried out in 32 different Qiang-speaking sites, with varying amounts of data being collected in different sites.  Two members of the team that worked on Qiang were Liu Guangkun and Sun Hongkai (now retired). An early report drafted by them was published with 'Institute of Nationalities, Chinese Academy of Sciences' as the author in the journal Zhongguo Yuwen in 1962, but work on the data was disrupted because of the Cultural Revolution.   Since the late 1970's Liu and Sun have tried to work up and publish more of the data collected in the 1950's (Sun 1981a, 1981b, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1988; Liu 1981, 1984, 1987, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1999).

Huang Bufan, another member of the original team (now retired from the Central University of Nationalities), also has been publishing important work on Qiang (Huang 1987, 1991, 1994; 2000, 2002; Huang, Yu & Huang 1992).  Of the works published by Sun, Liu, and Huang, two are brief descriptions of Qiang dialects (Sun 1981a on the Taoping variety of Southern Qiang and Liu 1998 on the Mawo variety of Northern Qiang), and one (Huang Bufan 1991) is an overview of all of the Qiangic languages -- the branch of Tibeto-Burman that Qiang belongs to, which includes Pumi (Prinmi), rGyalrong, Muya, Ergong, Shixing, Namuzi (see Sun 1982, 1983, 1985).   The others mainly deal with specific grammatical features, such as the verbal orientation prefixes (Sun 1981b; Huang Bufan 1994), the case forms of the personal pronouns (Liu 1987), and the person marking (Liu 1999). These three scholars have trained a native Qiang linguist, Huang Chenglong, who has published a number of articles on his native dialect, the Ronghong Village variety of the Yadu subdialect of the Northern dialect (1992, 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2003; Huang, Yu & Huang 1992).  Randy J. LaPolla and Dory Poa began doing fieldwork on the Northern Qiang dialects of Ronghong and Qugu in 1994. Randy LaPolla has published an overview sketch of Ronghong Qiang (LaPolla 2003a) and a paper on the evidentials of the Ronghong variety (LaPolla 2003b), as well as a lexical list and texts in the Qugu variety (LaPolla 2003c; LaPolla & Poa 2003). Randy LaPolla and Huang Chenglong have presented papers on adjectives (LaPolla & Huang 2002a) and copula constructions (LaPolla & Huang 2002b) in Qiang, and collaborated on a full reference grammar, the most complete description of a Qiang dialect written so far (LaPolla with Huang, 2003). Jonathan Evans, another collaborator on this site, has published a monograph on the Southern Qiang lexicon and phonology (2001a) and a paper on contact-induced tonogenesis in Qiang (2001b), and has presented a paper on the directional prefixes (2000). Aside from this, Gong Hwang-cheng of the Insititue of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, carried out fieldwork on several Southern Qiang dialects, but has not yet published his data.