Lalo regional varieties: phylogeny, dialectometry, and sociolinguistics

TL;DRAbstract

Lalo is a Central Ngwi (Loloish) language cluster spoken in western Yunnan, China by fewer than 300,000 speakers. The purpose of this thesis is to subgroup Lalo regional varieties according to shared innovations that are unlikely to have occurred by chance, contact, or drift. As a complement to the subgrouping, Lalo varieties are also classified according to phonetic distance and intelligibility. Previous research has focused mostly on one variety of Lalo, spoken in western Weishan County (Björverud 1998; Huang and Dai 1992; Chen et al. 1985). In this thesis, the phonological systems of fifteen Lalo varieties are described, many for the first time. Proto-Lalo is then reconstructed by applying the comparative method to Lalo varieties' lexicons and by tracing Proto-Lalo’s development from Proto-Ngwi (Bradley 1979b) and Proto-Burmic (Lolo-Burmese) (Matisoff 2003). Tone changes in various Lalo varieties show voiced prevocalic segments conditioning the development of a low-rising tone and h

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