Songlin language

Songlin (Chinese: 松林语) is a divergent, unclassified Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Zayu County, Nyingchi Prefecture, Tibet. A linguistic description of Songlin has been published in a monograph by Song (2019).

Songlin speakers refer to their language as sang3lin1bu1lo3gye1, and to Songlin village as sang3lin1 (Song 2019:6).

Jiang Huo (江获) first learned about the existence of Songlin while doing research on Idu during the 2000s, when local Idu people in the Upper Chayu Town area reported that the "Songleng Tuyu" 松冷土语 was spoken nearby. After preliminary data was collected in 2014, intensive field work was conducted during the summers of 2015–2017 by a Chinese research team led by Li Daqin (李大勤) (Song 2019:13). A monograph documenting the Songlin language, Xizang Chayu Songlin yu (西藏察隅松林语), was written by Song Cheng (宋成) and submitted for publication in 2018. The book was released in 2019.

The language is spoken in Songlin Village 松林村, Upper Chayu Town 上察隅镇 by approximately 1,000 people. The local lingua franca of the area is the Zayu dialect of Khams Tibetan. Some Songlin speakers can speak Idu and gSerkhu, both of which are also spoken in Upper Chayu Town 上察隅镇.

Songlin village is located on the western banks of the Kangrigarbo Qu (贡日嘎布曲) river, several kilometers to the northwest of the Upper Chayu/Shangchayu Town (ʐoŋ˧˩ȶø˥ in Songlin; located further downstream on the same river). Some nearby villages include Gonggu 巩固, Xiba 西巴 (ɕi˥tɑ˥ in Songlin), and Rongyu 荣玉 to the north, and Zongba 宗巴 and Migu 米古 to the south (Song 2019:6).

Song & Lin (2020) shows that Songlin is not closely related to any of the surrounding Tibeto-Burman languages and cannot be classified as a Tibetic language. A computational phylogenetic study by Jiang (2023) also demonstrates the divergent position of Songlin. Songlin and the Mishmi languages all are spoken in Zayu County, but Songlin is not closely related to any of them.

The consonant inventory of Songlin is as follows (Song 2019:18–19).

Consonant clusters include: nb, nd, nȡ, nɟ, ng, ndz, ndʑ, ndʐ, pʐ, pʰʐ, bʐ, nbʐ, kʐ, kʰʐ, gʐ, nbʐ, ngʐ. /n/- is treated as part of consonant clusters, rather than as part of prenasalized initial consonants.

Note: In Sinology, ȵ is roughly equivalent to [ɲ] or [nʲ], while ȶ and ȡ can typically be transcribed as [tʲ] and [dʲ], respectively, although in practice they can actually be equivalent to [tʃ] or [dʒ] instead, or other similar affricates. Also, ɕ and ʑ often, but not always, correspond to [ʃ] and [ʒ] in IPA transcriptions used by non-Sinologists. For further information, see obsolete and nonstandard symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

There are 12 vowels: i, y, ɯ, u, e, ø, o, ə, ɛ, ɑ, ɿ, ʮ (Song 2019:21–22).

Songlin has 5 diphthongs: ui, ɯi, ou, ie, iɛ.

Note that ɿ [ɨ] is used by Sinologists, as well as ʮ ([ʉ], [ɹ̩ʷ] or [z̩ʷ]), which is a labialized syllabic denti-alveolar approximant used by Sinologists.

There are three tones in Songlin.

About 50% of all words in Songlin have the high level tone /˥/, while the mid rising /˨˦/ and low falling /˧˩/ tones are each found in approximately 25% of all Songlin words (Song 2019:24).

Song (2019:30–32) proposes a pinyin-based script for Songlin.

Tones are transcribed using the numerals 1, 2, and 3 (see the Tones section above):

Example phrase (Song 2019:33):

ga1sii1 ga1sii1 dyv1 neng3

'once upon a time'/'a very long time ago' (很久很久以前)

Some common prefixes in Songlin are (Song 2019:43):

• ɑ˧˩-: nominal prefix
• mɑ˧˩-: nominal prefix
• kə˧˩-: used before some verbs, some body parts, and various nouns

Some suffixes are:

• -pɑ˥: used with human-related terms, body parts, and others
• -tso˥: 'son' (儿); masculine/diminutive, used to mark an animate noun (person or animal) as male, juvenile, or small

Reduplication is commonly used to form new nouns (Song 2019:45–46).

The Songlin pronouns are (Song 2019:134):

Songlin interrogatives are (Song 2019:140):

The following Songlin sentence examples are from Yan (Song 2020:656). Songlin has SOV word order.

The following are Songlin words cited from Song (2020).