Talk:Yang Zhuang language

Dejing dialect area

The language status of Yang Zhuang is still under debate. In fact, it might be simply one of several distinct languages within the Debao-Jingxi-Napo area. See https://mail.link77.net/~emily_jackson@sil.org/20110629DRAFT-English-Dejing_survey_report-ESR.pdf .

Dejing is probably not Yang Zhuang. "Dejing" is short for Debao-Jingxi, and Yang is what some, but not all, speakers in the Debao-Jingxi region call themselves. Jackson (2011) describes a lot of divergent dialects in the Dejing dialect area (southwestern Guangxi) such as Zong, Min, Langhua, and many others. It's very likely that they can't all be stuffed under "Yang Zhuang." — Stevey7788 (talk) 07:47, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Defintely not fair to say these are the same. Whilst Yang Zhang well defined, the term Deijing Zhuang is vague, or incorrect, since in Debao and Jingxi Counties have several Zhuang languages are spoken. Therefore removed the comment.Johnkn63 (talk) 02:36, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Well, these terms are two different ways of referring to people, so it's important to keep that straight so as not to be comparing apples and oranges. The term "Dejing," which I believe originates with the surveys, is based on geography (ie, "Does this person live in either Jingxi, Debao, or Napo county?"), while -- as you say, Stevey7788 -- "Yang" is the term used by some speakers within that area to refer to their variety of the local language. (And although language is used as an identifier to mark ethnic divisions, there isn't a terribly strong feeling of a separate ethnic identity for someone who refers to themselves as a speaker of Yang, as opposed to someone who would refer to themselves as a speaker of Fu, for instance; many people in the area simply refer to what they speak as "local speech," distinct from Chinese.) And these terms can be used at different ontological levels, which introduces another type of ambiguity. There can be more autonyms than there are distinct "languages," as the ISO would count them. For instance, the speech varieties from this geographical area that are indicated by the terms "lang 狼话" and "fu 府话", at least (and possibly some uses of the term "nong 侬话"), may possibly be indistinguishable, or only marginally distinguishable, but not so great as to impede inherent mutual comprehension. That's one of the empirical questions that Jackson et al's (2012) survey was trying to answer. "Yang Zhuang" is the name currently assigned to the category of all speech varieties that can be classified within the ISO 639-3 code [zyg] (classified thusly on the basis of inherent mutual intelligibility), but this category is a different object than what you would get if you say that "Yang Zhuang" is the set of speech varieties whose native speakers refer to the language that they speak using the term "Yang." The latter category by definition includes speech varieties spoken just by speakers who say that they speak Yang, while the former category includes speech varieties whose speakers would refer to themselves as speakers of at least Lang, Fu, and Nong. So, is this page about the autonym "Yang 仰 (and possibly "Nùng Giang" in Vietnam)," or about the language which is denoted by the ISO code [zyg]? Iqslwnq (talk) 06:24, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

References

Citation within the page

In the Distribution section is the following sentence:

Jackson (2011) shows that most Yang dialects do indeed form a distinctive subgroup against Fu (also shown to be a distinctive subgroup) and Nong.

Should this be Johnson, rather than Jackson (and if Jackson, it should be Jackson et al)? If so, which of the Johnson references? There is a section of Johnson (2011b:54) which talks about the relationship between Jingxi Yang Zhuang and the Zhuang spoken in Debao County, but this is somewhat of an aside to his main point, and in fact Johnson is referring in that section to "recent data from an SIL International East Asia Group and Guangxi Region Language Commission survey of the Zhuang languages of this area," namely the survey which is described in Jackson et al (2012). I don't know the intent of the original author of this page, but based on my understanding of those references, I'd say that the better source to cite was Jackson et al 2012, since that paper is specifically focused on the varieties of Zhuang spoken in Jingxi and Debao Counties. Iqslwnq (talk) 06:24, 8 December 2014 (UTC)