Khatso 喀卓语 [kʰa⁵⁵tso³¹tɕʰi³¹], is an endangered language that is spoken in a single farming village, called Xingmeng 兴蒙, which is located in Tonghai County 通海县 in Yunnan Province 云南省, China. The Khatso people, who number about 5600, are descendants of the Mongol soldiers Kublai Khan brought to Yunnan in the 13th century, and they still identify as Mongol today. There appears to be nothing Mongolic about the language today, however. It is now considered part of the Ngwi (Yi 彝语) sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman language family.
Khatso has eight contour tones: three level, two rising, two falling and a low falling-rising tone. Syllable structure is typically CV, but a syllable can minimally contain a single continuant, such as a vowel or nasal. The basic lexicon largely consists of monosyllabic and disyllabic words, but reduplication and compounding may produce words of three or more syllables. There is a rich classifier system, and bare classifiers are used in discourse to mark number and specific reference.
Khatso is a highly analytic language with little morphology. Aspect is conveyed through post-verbal and phrase-final particles. Serial verb constructions are also frequent. At the phrase level, Khatso is an APV (SOV) language, though word order is flexible and given arguments are typically omitted. There is an agent marker, but constituents are mostly determined by phrase position and pragmatics. Many of the particles and constructions in the language are multifunctional, allowing them to be interpreted in several, often very different, ways. Pragmatics, including real world knowledge, is required to resolve the intended meaning of these structures in discourse.
Over the past several decades bilingualism in Chinese has changed the use of Khatso in the village. In certain domains Chinese may be more commonly used than Khatso, such as government services or medical clinics. Education has been a driving force in the spread of bilingualism, since only Chinese is used in the classroom. And attending junior high, which is obligatory in China, requires all Khatso students to leave the village for boarding schools where they live in all-Chinese environments. At the urging of teachers, many parents now purposely teach children Chinese as their first language. Moreover, Khatso has no writing system, so Chinese must be used for any written medium. As a result, the language is classified as endangered by both Ethnologue and UNESCO.
My collaboration with the Khatso, which is ongoing, has resulted in a number of works, as listed below.
Khatso has eight contour tones: three level, two rising, two falling and a low falling-rising tone. Syllable structure is typically CV, but a syllable can minimally contain a single continuant, such as a vowel or nasal. The basic lexicon largely consists of monosyllabic and disyllabic words, but reduplication and compounding may produce words of three or more syllables. There is a rich classifier system, and bare classifiers are used in discourse to mark number and specific reference.
Khatso is a highly analytic language with little morphology. Aspect is conveyed through post-verbal and phrase-final particles. Serial verb constructions are also frequent. At the phrase level, Khatso is an APV (SOV) language, though word order is flexible and given arguments are typically omitted. There is an agent marker, but constituents are mostly determined by phrase position and pragmatics. Many of the particles and constructions in the language are multifunctional, allowing them to be interpreted in several, often very different, ways. Pragmatics, including real world knowledge, is required to resolve the intended meaning of these structures in discourse.
Over the past several decades bilingualism in Chinese has changed the use of Khatso in the village. In certain domains Chinese may be more commonly used than Khatso, such as government services or medical clinics. Education has been a driving force in the spread of bilingualism, since only Chinese is used in the classroom. And attending junior high, which is obligatory in China, requires all Khatso students to leave the village for boarding schools where they live in all-Chinese environments. At the urging of teachers, many parents now purposely teach children Chinese as their first language. Moreover, Khatso has no writing system, so Chinese must be used for any written medium. As a result, the language is classified as endangered by both Ethnologue and UNESCO.
My collaboration with the Khatso, which is ongoing, has resulted in a number of works, as listed below.