Buyi (Jichang)
Audio recordings: Andrew Hsiu. (2017). Buyi (Jichang) audio word list. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1122545
Conference presentations: Hsiu, Andrew. 2013. “Shui” varieties of western Guizhou and Yunnan.
On April 6, 2013, I interviewed He Weifu (born October 1939 in Dawan village 大湾村), a Buyi speaker who was born in and has lived all his life in Dawan, Jichang Township 鸡场苗族彝族布依族乡, Zhijin County, Guizhou, China. He says that ethnic Buyi clothing is now rarely worn in Dawan, and that the younger generations speak Buyi with Chinese accents or not at all. However, the older generations are completely fluent in Buyi, and he was proud of the fact that Dawan is one of the few villages in the township where Buyi is still widely spoken, at least by the elderly generation. The Buyi of Dawan had been officially classified as Shui until the 1980’s, when they were reclassified as Buyi. The neighboring villages just downhill still say that the residents of Dawan are ethnic “Shui” (水族), although the Dawan residents now say they are ethnic “Buyi” (布依族).
Buyi of Zhijin County has not been documented in the Wu, Snyder, & Liang's (2007) extensive Buyi dialect survey. I am not aware of any Buyi dialects of Zhijin County that had been previously documented. Jichang Buyi is a Western Qian [Guizhou] dialect, using Snyder's (2008) classification of Buyi dialects. It is the least spoken of the three Buyi dialects in Guizhou, which are Western Qian, Central Qian, and Southern Qian. Western Qian Buyi is spoken in Zhenning, Guanling, Ziyun, Qinglong, Pu'an, Liuzhi, Panxian, Shuicheng, Bijie, and Weining counties. The other Western Qian dialect that I have documented is Buyi of Suode, Pan County.
Jichang Buyi displays initial nasal consonant fortition for some words, which is a feature also found in the Qau (Central) Gelao dialects of Wanzi and Dagouchang. Examples of hardened nasal consonants in Jichang Buyi include mbu³⁵ 'new' (m- instead of mb- in other Buyi dialects) and tə³³ŋkəɯ²¹ 'snake' (ŋ- instead of ŋk- in other Buyi dialects). All final stop consonants have also been lost.
There were also ethnic White Miao in Wupu 乌普, which some residents in neighboring villages confuse as ethnic “Bai” (白族). No actual ethnic Bai have been found in Jichang Township 鸡场乡.
My driver, an ethnic Qing/Qingzu (also known as "Chuanqing") man, told me that his ancestors had migrated from “Jiangxi” (江西). No traces of their language and customs remain.
References
Snyder, Wil C. (2008). "Bouyei Phonology." In Diller, Anthony, Jerold A. Edmondson, and Yongxian Luo ed. The Tai–Kadai Languages. Routledge Language Family Series. Psychology Press, 2008.
Wu Wenyi, Wil C. Snyder, and Liang Yongshu. 2007. Survey of the Guizhou Bouyei Language. SIL Language and Culture Documentation and Description 2007-001. Dallas: SIL International.