A Grammatical Sketch of Hainan Cham

History, Contact, and Phonology

Graham Thurgood, Ela Thurgood, Li Fengxiang

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781614518778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume is a grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham, an endangered tonal Austronesian language. The study focuses on three areas: social background and contact history, the grammar (including all the recorded vocabulary), and a description of the sound system (including acoustic description). The appendixes also include the wordlist of Sanya Chinese forms and four analyzed texts.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hainan Cham [HC] is an endangered language spoken largely in two small villages on the island of Hainan on the outskirts of Sanya City. It is closely related to the Chamic languages of coastal and highland Vietnam, but it was in contact with the Li languages in the past and now faces relentless pressure from Chinese, rapidly changing, restructuring itself in the direction of standard Mandarin.

The Chamic languages form part of Malayo-Chamic under Malayo-Polynesian, which in turn is part of the vast Austronesian family. Its relatives include the older written Chamic – still underutilized by scholars – and the modern languages: the Rade, Jarai, Haroi, Chru, and Roglai spoken in the southern Vietnam highlands; the Cham spoken in villages usually within 20 to 30 kilometers of the Vietnamese coast; the various Cham communities of Cambodia; the Acehnese of north Sumatra ; the various Cham-speaking ex-patriot communities in various other parts of the world; and, the focus of this work, the Cham spoken on Hainan.

A grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham with a focus on history, contact, and phonology examines HC from the perspective of language contact. At the same time, the volume brings together in one place what is known about the phonology and grammar, albeit a limited sketch, as the database itself is limited. The database, except for the instrumental data, dates from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s. At that time, the consultants Zheng and Ouyang worked with were the oldest and most fluent living speakers. However, by the time we did instrumental fieldwork in 2004, all of the older speakers had died, and the speakers we worked with were much younger and no longer spoke the HC of the speakers in the Zheng and Ouyang database. The modern variant spoken by the speakers we worked with is significantly more sinicized and would require its own grammatical description. One consequence is that the database for this study is, not just limited, but is also unlikely to get any larger. The gaps are particularly evident working with the synchronic grammar; the small size of the database and the lack of fully fluent older speakers makes for limitations that we suspect are permanent. Nonetheless, the imprint of contact often stands out clearly. Other areas are more accessible. The social background and the contact history are fairly clear. The phonology is reasonably well-understood; in fact, the phonological section includes extensive instrumental work based on our fieldwork in 2004. The discussion of tones is fairly detailed. And, the glossary includes all forms in published sources and in our field notes.

The textual database itself consists of roughly 400 sentences accompanied by four texts, two collected by Zheng and Ouyang in 1981 and two collected in 1994. As already noted, the fluent older speakers Zheng and Ouyang worked with in the ‘80s and early ‘90s are no longer alive. Our more recent consultants, with one exception, not only were themselves 30 years younger than Zheng and Ouyang’s consultants, but they already used HC in a more restricted set of domains. Although it was their first language, HC was rarely used outside the village by any of our consultants. Further, preliminary attempts at sentence elicitation produced utterances far more sinicized than the database Zheng and Ouyang collected earlier. We decided to focus our elicitation on the phonology and use the database gathered earlier for the grammatical sketch.¹ The database, although limited, is quite valuable for studying contact.

HC is spoken on the southern side of Hainan Island, facing the South China Sea. The community is the remains of what was originally a number of Chamic trading outposts on Hainan providing a layover for Chamic commercial travel between the various Champa political entities and China. When developments in the techniques of navigation made it possible to take more direct routes to and from China instead of simply following the coastlines, Champa was no longer central to the trade routes. This loss of trade was followed by the Vietnamese movement down the coastlines, foreshadowing Champa’s demise.

Two Chamic migrations from the mainland with linguistic implications are noted in Map 1. The first migration is to Hainan following the fall of the Northern Cham at Indrapura in 982. The dates suggest that, initially the Northern Cham seem to have fled south to the area near Vijaya; then, while part of the group remained in the south eventually becoming the Northern Roglai, many of the traders in the group resettled on Hainan in 986 and 988.

The second linguistically-relevant migration is just before the fall of Vijaya in 1471, with a significant number of Chams moving to Aceh, establishing the Acehnese dynasty (discussed below). This date matches the dating on the dynastic bell, which gives 1469–1470 as the beginning of the Acehnese dynasty. The subgrouping implicit in this is that Acehnese is just another Chamic language rather than a branch separate from the other mainland languages, a position Grant (2005a: 38; 2005b: 135) defends. The position is not universally accepted, however; Sidwell (2005), for example, argues for Acehnese being a separate branch of what he terms Aceh-Chamic; this position would also require an much earlier date. The 1469–70 date seems inconsistent with a note in Grant (2005a), which says that Marco Polo met some Acehnese in northern Sumatra in 1292.

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Map 1: Map of Champa, Hainan Cham, and Acehnese

The Hainan Cham, now just a coastal group in the Sanya area (tip of arrow labeled Hainan Cham on map), is the best documented remnant of the migration to Hainan. Like all Chamic languages, the arriving HC was heavily influenced in its lexicon, in its phonology, and in its grammar, by extensive contact with speakers of a Mon-Khmer language.² HC also shows intensive contact with Sanya Mandarin, a dialect of Southwest Mandarin, as well as more limited contact with other languages of Hainan including the Hlai languages [=Li languages] in the Tai-Kadai family.

1.1 The Name Cham

As their name suggests, the modern Hainan Cham are the descendants of the ancient Cham of Champa. The self-designation of the people is hu²¹tsa:nʔ³³ ‘Chamic people’ (Maddieson and Pang (1993: 88) and Pang (1998: 55), which is composed of the prefix hu²¹ ‘people’ + tsa:nʔ³³ ‘Cham’ ( < Proto-Chamic [PC]“,4]”,4] *cam ‘Cham’), and their autonym for their language is /tsa:nʔ³³/ ‘Cham’.³ Elsewhere, as Goschnick (1977: 106) writes, other Chamic subgroups have also used ‘Cham’ in their name: the Cham Raglai (the Roglai; from ra ‘people’ + glai ‘forest’), the Cham Jarai (the Jarai), the Cham Kur (Cham + kŭr ‘Khmer’, the Western Cham of Cambodia and Southern Vietnam), and the Cham Ro > - Chru (from Cham + rɔ ‘remnant’).

At times the Chinese refer to the HC with the overly-broad designation Huízu ‘Muslims’, a term meaning Muslim people and at other times they use Huihui ‘Muslims’, an exonym, to refer to all Muslims including the HC, another overly-broad designation. The HC themselves, when speaking Chinese, call themselves huj²¹tsok²⁴, which is simply the phrase Huízú ‘Muslims’ as it occurs in their dialect of Chinese. We follow Ouyang and Jiang Di, the two Chinese linguists we worked with in the summer of 2004, and local usage in using Hainan Cham (or, Cham, for short) when referring to them in English. This term, which is certainly accurate etymologically and historically, will be adopted here.

1.2 Convergence Under Contact

Part of the focus of this volume is on the role of contact in the typological restructuring of HC – something inseparable from an insightful description of modern HC. What makes HC of particular linguistic interest is its complete typological restructuring under the influence of contact with the other languages of Hainan, specifically with Sanya Mandarin.

Restructuring is found throughout HC. Several scholars have written about the syntactic restructuring (Ni Dabai 1988ab, 1990ab; Zheng 1997; Thurgood and Li 2003). However, the major focus in the literature has been on the development of a full tonal system from a completely atonal source (Benedict 1984, Haudricourt 1984, Maddieson and Pang 1993, Thurgood 1992, 1993, 1996, 1999).

The work on HC tonogenesis was done on the basis of several early articles by Ouyang and Zheng (1983a), Zheng (1981, 1986, but not 1997), and Ni Dabai (1988ab, 1990ab). Thurgood (1999) published a broader historical work, one that included a preliminary reconstruction of Proto-Chamic (that is, Common Chamic before the diaspora), including HC and its place in Chamic.⁴ However, before Zheng 1997, HC was only modestly documented, resulting in gaps in our understanding of the reflexes of long versus short vowels and of allophonic details of HC tonogenesis.

This work provides a grammatical overview of HC, incorporating all the data we are aware of, while at the same time sketching in some detail the Chinese contact influence on the language.

In terms of phonology, HC has restructured from a sesquisyllabic, iambically stressed, atonal (although probably marginally registral) language to a monosyllabic, fully tonal language. New phonemes have also been added under the influence of the languages of Hainan.

Already a Subject-Verb-Object language (SVO), under Mandarin influence, it has modified the order of head and modifier in dependent genitives, adjectives, demonstratives, relative clauses, and comparative structures. The syntactic restructuring cannot be neatly separated from the lexical borrowing: a number of grammaticalized morphemes were borrowed accompanied by their syntax. In short, the pa...

Table of contents

• Pacific Linguistics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Table of Figures
• Conventions
• List of abbreviations
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - The people and the setting
• Chapter 3 - Legends and History
• Chapter 4 - The linguistic setting
• Chapter 5 - The Hainan Cham sound system
• Chapter 6 - Acoustic analyses
• Chapter 7 - Word classes
• Chapter 8 - Clause types
• Chapter 9 - Discourse Pragmatics
• Chapter 10 - Contact summary
• Texts
• Appendix A
• Appendix A - English – Hainan Cham Glossary
• Appendix B - The Stübel wordlist
• Appendix C - Sanya Mandarin
• References
• Index