Gelao is one of the most endangered languages in China, with only approximately 5,000 people estimated to be able to speak the language. It is a member of the Kra branch of the Tai-Kadai family of languages that spread across national boundaries in mainland Southeast Asia.
Gelao speakers are mainly found in Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan provinces in south and southwest China. A small number of Gelao speakers are also reported to have been found in Vietnam on the China-Vietnam border areas of Cao Bang, Ha Giang, Lao Cai and Son La provinces.
Officially recognized as one of the 55 officially minority ethnic groups within China, Gelao has a population of about 500,000, according to the 2000 national census. The Gelao language is characterized by dialect diversity and, quite often, speakers from different varieties are unable to communicate with one another. The degrees of diversity make language preservation efforts more complex, but the Gelao community, as a whole, welcomes it.
The majority have become monolingual in Southwestern Mandarin, a dialect of the official language of China. This is becoming more prevalent due to various factors such as lack of a writing system, strong economic pressure, rapid cultural assimilation, and the ‘Compulsory Education Policy’ (primary and secondary education in Chinese). Bi-lingual education is available to primary school children in some areas, but with contemporary communications technology more non-Han children are able to understand Mandarin. No detailed investigation has been conducted on this trend, but our general impression is that the younger generation has virtually all shifted to Southwestern Mandarin or Standard Chinese. However, at home, the native language is used, particularly in families with grandparents. If this trend continues, it is highly likely that the language may be left without native speakers in just two to three generations.
History
Scholars believe that the earliest record of the Gelao ethnicity in Chinese chronicles and texts dates back to as early as the Han times (206 BC to 220 AD), when they were mentioned as the Pu 濮, but later as the Lao 僚. Despite their present sporadic demographic distribution and small population, the Gelao people are believed to be the oldest inhabitants of a relatively vast area upon which they once built their own kingdom centering around the present-day Guizhou, stretching as far as the west of Hunan, and the south of Sichuan, the northeast of Yunnan and the northwest of Guangxi. This area is believed to be the territory of the historical Yelang Kingdom (夜郎国).
Traditional dress of Gelao women, Dagouchang Village (2006). Credit: Yancheng He.
Gelao are believed to be one of the indigenous people of the region. This is supported by the fact that they still retain the practice of picking ready-for-harvest rice ears at liberty from the rice fields of any other ethnic groups during the New Rice Tasting Festival without being stopped or condemned, as they are widely regarded as the earliest inhabitants of the region and the cultivators of the land. A typical example of this comes from the Gelao people living in Dagouchang Village of Pingba County who, when celebrating the New Rice Tasting Festival, sing folk songs and offer newly ripe rice ears to their ancestors as a homage.
Their use of particular terms in relation to themselves also seems to indicate that the Gelao people regard themselves as the indigenous people of the region. The Gelao people at Hongfeng Village call themselves *pu⁵⁵ɣəu³³, pu⁵⁵ being a classifier for human being, and ɣəu³³ meaning ‘person, people’. They refer to other ethnic groups in the area using the class noun pu⁵⁵: the Han Chinese as pu⁵⁵pɪ³³ ‘the guests’ (pɪ³³ meaning ‘guest’), the Miao as pu⁵⁵ʑie³¹ ‘mountain people’ (ʑie³¹ ‘mountain’), and the Yi as pu⁵⁵wa³¹ ‘the newcomers’ (wa³¹ ‘new’). Incidentally, the name of the township seat, Pudi of Dafang County, comes from Yi, pʰu²¹ndɪ²¹ (Gelao flatland) ‘the flatland of the Gelao’. In addition, the Yi, Miao, Han Chinese, and other ethnic groups of this area all recognize that the Gelao group were the earliest inhabitants of the area
The current state of Gelao: the case of the Ahou dialect
Ahou, the target language of our present study, is one of the varieties of Gelao that is particularly endangered. In a language efficiency survey conducted in September, 2006 it was found that among the 372 Gelao people of Hongfeng Village, only 33 were fluent speakers, comprising less than 10 percent of the total population. In addition, 14 semi-fluent speakers were found and 15 individuals were capable of recalling some basic words only. Among the fluent speakers, most are above the age of 50 and children under the age of 15 do not speak Gelao.
In general, Chinese is the main language of communication among the Gelao people and even fluent speakers of Gelao usually communicate with one another in Chinese, because speaking Gelao is regarded by some young people as ‘unpleasant to the ear’. A young man told us that he was often bullied by Han Chinese students when he was at school simply because he spoke Gelao, which made him feel inferior. Unpleasant experiences of this kind may have contributed to language shift for some young speakers. This sociolinguistic situation, coupled with the influence of government policy, is accelerating the process of marginalising Gelao.
Another factor that contributes to the disappearing of the Gelao language is the sporadic distribution of the Gelao people, as households are scattered in the vast hilly area of Hongfeng Village. The Gelao people of Hongfeng Village, the administrative village consisting of six natural settlements, comprise about 43 per cent of the village’s total population of some 862 people. About 200 live in Dazhai (Main Hamlet) settlement, the concentrated area of this particular community, with the rest living together with other ethnic groups of Miao, Yi and Han Chinese. This demographic pattern leads to the increasing use of Chinese as the main language of communication at the expense of Gelao in daily communication even among Gelao speakers.
The genetic affiliation of Gelao to Austronesian
Anthropologist Paul Benedict provided a stimulus for and inaugurated a new ‘era’ in the study of the lesser-known languages of Gelao. Since then, an increasing body of new data has been gathered on Gelao. The last two decades have witnessed a substantial amount of work from different perspectives: historical, comparative, and typological. Nguyen Van Huy has reported several Gelao varieties in Ha Giang Province of Northern Vietnam. Jiashan He presents an overview the Gelao language in China, followed by works on the ethnological aspect of Gelao as well as its affiliation within Tai-Kadai. Further field data and analyses are available.
Western scholars have come to a consensus that Gelao is a branch within Tai-Kadai. Research shows that Gelao retains some of the early features of Tai-Kadai that are either lost in other Tai-Kadai languages or have left some traces that need to be confirmed or explained. For example, Gelao numerals are unique among Tai-Kadai. They are found to exhibit some connections with Austronesian—the family of languages spoken by a large group of peoples from Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar—as reflected in a number of lexical items. As such, findings of more in-depth empirical studies may provide important clues to some vexing issues regarding the ultimate affiliation of Tai-Kadai—such as the nature of the relationship between Tai-Kadai and Austronesian, whether they have shared origins and whether the lexical correspondences were the results of borrowing—and throw new light on our understanding of the complex relations among East and Southeast Asian languages.
The following selected lexical comparisons, some of which have already been proposed by earlier scholars, may suggest potential links between Gelao (along with its close cousins Tai, and Kam-Sui) and Austronesian.
Figure 1
*A proto form is the presumed or reconstructed ancestral form of a word; an asterisk [*] indicates an unattested, reconstructed form.
It is hoped that further work may reveal more promising results, which will help us to have a better understanding of issues relating to the prehistory and the peopling of Southeast Asia.
Grammatical sketch
Ahou is a non-inflectional language, having no inflection of the type found in Indo-European languages. It is a tonal language like Mandarin Chinese where tones distinguish meanings. The language is largely monosyllabic, that is, “one syllable, one meaning”. It has preserved many old phonological features of the Tai-Kadai group, such as the complexity of the initial consonants. It also exhibits some phonological processes such as assimilation with change of syllable rhymes and grammatically motivated tone variations which exhibit features of “word family”, i.e. words that are related with subtle differences in meaning.
Ahou has a complex phonological system, with 42 contrastive initial consonant phonemes (sounds usually associated in English with p, b, d and t), and seven single contrastive vowels and 4 distinct lexical tones. It has a rich and symmetrical set of fricatives (sounds usually associated in English with letters such as f, s; v, z) contrasting between voiced and voiceless at five different points of articulation. It has nasals at four different places of articulation. All these nasals have pre-glottalized and voiceless contrast, , a feature that is also found in some languages of the Kam-Sui group within Tai-Kadai.
There are two open word classes: nouns and verbs. Nouns can be modified by a classifier alone or by a numeral-classifier compound, and verbs can be preceded by negation or adverbs. Closed form classes include pronouns, demonstratives, classifiers, numerals, particles (clause-final ones for conveying speakers’ attitudes, and moods in particular), modal verbs, interjections and conjunctions.
The order of noun phrases is typically of a ‘head’ + ‘modifier’ structure. All modifiers except numerals follow the modified head, with demonstratives occurring at the end of the noun phrase.
Ahou shows a subject-verb-object word order typology. Negators come before the verb. The verb can also be preceded by an adverb and a modal/auxiliary.
Numerals
Ahou/Gelao numerals in some cases are different to other Tai-Kadai languages. While Ahou is like other Tai-Kadai languages in having ‘one’ to ‘ten’, ‘zero’, ‘hundred’, ‘thousand’, ‘ten thousand’, and ‘hundred million’ as unique and basic forms, the forms for ‘eleven’ to ‘nineteen’ are unusual in that the units precedes the tens and a classifier ma³³ must intervene in between, yielding sɿ⁵⁵ma³³ɕe¹³ (one-ma³³-ten) ‘eleven’, səu³³ma³³ɕe¹³ (two-ma³³-ten) ‘twelve’, sau¹³ma³³ɕie¹³ (nine-ma³³-ten) ‘nineteen’. No other Tai-Kadai languages studied so far are found to exhibit this pattern.
All of the forms are the original Gelao forms, except for ‘zero’ and ‘hundred million’, which are probably Chinese loan words.
Figure 2
No dedicating ordinal numbers (such as ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’, show the order, position or importance of things in a list or sequence) are found in Ahou. Ordinal expressions can be made by placing the corresponding cardinal numbers after the nominal heads they enumerate, e.g. lei⁵⁵-wa³³-pau³³ (CL.DIM-women-four) ‘the fourth girl’, haŋ³³-tɪ³³ (day-three) ‘the third day’. Note that the opposite order between the cardinal numbers and the nominals will result in different meanings, i.e. pau³³ lei⁵⁵-wa³³ (four CLF.DIM-women) ‘four girls’, tɪ³³ haŋ³³ (three day) ‘three days’.
The positive effects of language preservation efforts
In 2006, the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Project awarded a grant to Professor Li Jinfang and his team from the Minzu University of China, which allowed extensive fieldwork to be carried out on two varieties of Gelao: Zoulei and Ahou. The project benefited from extensive earlier work by scholars Zhang Jimin in the 1980s, Ni Dabai in the 1990s and Zhou Guoyan in the 2000s.
In addition to the generous funding support from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China has also provided much-needed support for the documentation of Gelao with the Language Preservation Project (语保 yubao “language protection” in Chinese). So far, several varieties or vernaculars of Gelao have been documented—including varieties spoken in the Hongfeng Village of Dafang County, the Judu Village of Liuzhi Township, the Bigong Village of Zhenneng County, the Dagouchang Village of Pingba County, the Zhenfeng and those scattered in the county of Malipo—making Gelao one of the most extensively studied among Tai-Kadai. Of these, language data from Bigong and Hong Feng dialects have been stored in SOAS’s database. Fieldwork data from the project have been deposited in the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme website and made available via other sites.
Efforts are being made by researchers to compile dictionaries for the Hongfeng, Bigong, and Judu varieties. Evening schools have been set up for younger generations to learn the Gelao language, a move that has been welcomed and which has aroused enthusiasm from the local communities, with Gelao elders expressing their desire to revive their native language. This language preservation work has also helped communities with identity building and socio-economic development. In some areas, cultural tourism has increased.
The maintenance of cultural diversity is as vital as that of biodiversity. Awareness should be raised to make cultural development go hand in hand with economic development. Gelao is a good example of what academic efforts as well as philanthropic and policy initiatives can contribute to revitalising marginalised languages and cultures.
* Numerals indicates tone marks.
Main image: Yancheng He (middle) showing his newly-invented Gelao scripts to the speakers (2018). Credit: Yancheng He.
