In total, there are about 28,320 Jinuo people living in China.[5] A total of 70–80% of Jinuo people can speak either of the Jino varieties fluently.[6] The Jino language constitutes the two subdialects of Youle Jino and Buyuan Jinuo,[7] and they are not mutually intelligible.
Buyuan Jino is spoken by 21,000 people;[8] most of the speakers are monolingual, which means they only speak Buyuan Jino.[4] There is no official written form. Most Jino people also speak one of the Tai languages or Chinese. The ISO 639-3 code for the Jino varieties are "jiu" for Youle Jino and "jiy" for Buyuan Jino.[8] The Glottocodes for the Jino varieties are "youl1235" for Youle Jino[9] and "buyu1238" for Buyuan Jino.[10]
Classification
The exact classification of Jino within the Loloish branch of Sino-Tibetan language family remains uncertain. Jino is classified as a Southern Loloish (Hanoish) language by Ziwo Lama (2012),[2] but as a Central Loloish language by Bradley (2007).[11] Jino is also classified as a Southern Loloish language in Satterthwaite-Phillips' (2011) computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages.[12]
History
The use of Jino is rapidly declining: in the 1980s, 70–80% of the Jino people used Jino; in 2000, less than 50% of the population could speak Jino.[13]
The Jino people were recognized by the state council on 6 June 1979 as the last recognized minority nationality in China.[13]
Historically, the Jino people were organized as a matriarchal culture, and “Jino” means “descending from the uncle,” and it refers to the importance of mother’s brother in matriarchal societies.[14]
From a language aspect, Jino is similar to other languages under the branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages, because the Jino people moved from the northwest of Yunnan province to the territories they are at now, but the timing and routes of this migration remain uncertain,[1]
There are five tonemes in Buyuan Jino. Gai believes that the function of tonemes are distinguishing lexical meanings and grammatical meanings.[15]
/˥/ (high level tone, 55): it tends to phonetically shorten vowels
/˦/ (mid level tone, 44): lower than 55, though still high
/˧˩/ (low falling tone, 31)
/˧˥/ (rising tone, 35)
/˥˧/ (high falling tone, 53)
/˥˧/ (53) tone is considered difficult to distinguish when listening to a native speaker.[7]
Writing system
Jino does not have an official writing system, but it developed several systems of signs to cover communication in different situations.[1] The Jino used engraved wooden or bamboo boards to record debts between villages.
^Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Jino". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
^Bradley, David (2007). "East and Southeast Asia". In Moseley, Christopher (ed.). Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 349–424.
^Gai, Xingzhi 盖兴之 (1986). Jīnuòyǔ jiǎnzhì 基诺语简志 [A Brief Description of the Jinuo Language] (in Chinese). Beijing: Minzu chubanshe.
References
Lama, Ziwo Qiu-Fuyuan (2012). Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages: A Study From the Perspectives of Shared Innovation and Phylogenetic Estimation (Ph.D. thesis). University of Texas at Arlington. hdl:10106/11161.