Jackson Eric M., Jackson Emily H.S., Lau Shuh Huey (eds.) A sociolinguistic survey of the Dejing Zhuang dialect area

Dallas: SIL International; the Guangxi minorities language and scripts work commission, 2012. — (SIL Electronic Survey Report 2012-036). — iv, 162 p.This report presents the results of a dialect intelligibility survey carried out in 2008 in the southwestern part of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, described by Zhang et al. (1999) as the Dejing dialect area of Southern Zhuang. The Zhuang varieties surveyed in this area have been grouped into the Central branch of Taic languages. This survey of nineteen locations across the dialect area found evidence from intelligibility, from similarity of wordlists (as determined by a string edit distance algorithm), and from speaker attitudes for assigning them to at least two distinct ISO 639-3 language codes, [zyg] “Yang Zhuang” and [zgm] “Minz Zhuang”. Previous published sources claimed that the variety of Yang spoken in the county seat of Jingxi County is well understood across the region. This survey tested this claim with recorded text tests (RTTs) from the county seat and a nearby rural area, and found them to be well understood across most of the Dejing area. Through comparison with the wordlist similarity results, however, this intelligibility is inherent only for a subset of the surveyed varieties; these varieties represent a cluster that is herein referred to as Yang-Nong, and includes several Zhuang varieties from this area. The high intelligibility of Jingxi Yang by speakers of other varieties is due to acquired ability in Jingxi Yang. Initial intelligibility results indicate another cluster of mutually-intelligible varieties in the area which we refer to as Min-Zong and which appears to correspond to the Minz of Yunnan Province; further fieldwork is needed to verify this in a more representative sample of these varieties.