Maza language explained

Maza
States:China
Ethnicity:Yi
Speakers:50
Date:2014
Ref:[1]
Familycolor:Sino-Tibetan
Fam2:Lolo-Burmese
Fam3:Mondzish
Iso3:none
Glotto:maza1306
Glottorefname:Maza

Maza (autonym: pronounced as /ma33 zɑ53/) is a Lolo-Burmese language spoken by the Yi people of China.

Maza is spoken by about 50 people in the village of Mengmei 孟梅 (Maza: pronounced as /qʰa33 le55/), Puyang Village 普阳村, Muyang Township 木央乡, Funing County, Yunnan. Maza has a Qabiao substratum, since the area was originally inhabited by Qabiao speakers (Hsiu 2014:68-69). Maza displays circumfixal negation, a syntactic feature that is usually typical of Kra languages.

Notes and References

  1. Hsiu, Andrew. 2014. "Mondzish: a new subgroup of Lolo-Burmese". In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-14). Taipei: Academia Sinica.