Sui language

Sui has seven vowels, /i e ə a aː o u/. Diphthongs are /ai̯ aːi̯ oi̯ ui̯ au̯ aːu̯ eu̯ iu̯/. There are six or seven tones, reduced to two in checked syllables. The tones of the Sandu Sui Autonomous County, Guizhou, listed by conventional tone numbers, are provided below, with numerical Chao tone equivalents also given in between slashes.

The alternate checked tone 7 is found on the long vowel /aːC/. Tone 8 is somewhat variable on a long vowel, appearing in different locations either higher or lower than the short allophone, but always falling, as in tones 2 and 4.

In some villages, tone 6 is two phonemes, /˨˦/ in native words and /˥/ in Chinese loanwords. In the village of Ngam, Libo county, tone 1 is low [˩], the others as above.

Consonants in parentheses were reported by the 1956 dialectology study Shuiyu diaocha baogao, but not in Li Fang Kuei's 1942 research in Libo County. (Labio-velars were not listed separately, so it's not clear if they also existed.)

/x/ only occurs phonemically in the Southern Sui dialects. /w/ is classed as a labial because it can be followed by a glide /j/. /j/ can also be pronounced as a voiced fricative [ʑ]. The prenasalized stops have very short nasalization. The voiceless nasals are actually voiced at the end, as most voiceless nasals are around the world. The preglottalized stops are truly preglottalized, not ejective or creaky voiced. The gammas have been described as fricatives, but here have been placed in the approximant row because of the preglottalized phone and the frequent ambiguity between dorsal fricatives and approximants.

In several locations in the Sandu Sui Autonomous County, the preglottalized consonants and the voiceless sonorants do not exist, having merged with the other consonants.

Syllable structure is CjVC^T, where /j/ may follow one of the labial or coronal consonants, other than /m̥ ʔm/ (and /ʔw/) and the affricates. (/tsj, tsʰj, tsw, tsʰw/ occur in recent Chinese loans.) All syllables start with a consonant, unless initial [ʔ] is analyzed as phonetic detail of an initial vowel. The final C is one of /p t k m n ŋ/. Final plosives are both unphonated (have glottal closure) and are unreleased; the coronal is apical alveolar: [ʔ͡p̚, ʔ͡t̚, ʔ͡k̚]. They reduce the tonic possibilities to two, "tones" 7 or 8.

The Sui script (Sui: le1 sui3,[6] Simplified Chinese: 水书, Traditional Chinese: 水書, Pinyin: Shuǐshū) is a logographic writing system with some pictographic characters that can be used to write the Sui language (Wei 2003:xxix).[7] However, traditionally only shamans were familiar with the writing system, and it is not utilized for everyday use by ordinary Sui people. This system is used for geomancy and divination purposes. There are at least 500 different Sui characters, known as le1 sui3 in the Sui language (Wei 2003:xxix). According to tradition, these characters were created by ljok8 to2 qong5 (Chinese Lù Duógōng 陸鐸公). Some of these characters are pictorial representations, such as of a bird or a fish, and a few are schematic representations of a characteristic quality, such a snail represented by a drawing of an inward curving spiral. Many of these characters appear to be borrowings from Chinese characters and are written backwards, apparently for increased supernatural power.

Today, the Sui people use written Chinese for their daily activities.

• (in Chinese) 張均如，《水語簡誌》，北京：民族出版社，1980。
• Stanford, James, Wei Shuqi & Lu Li. 2018. Ecologies of Sui sociolinguistics: A language permeated with rural social structures. In Christine Mallinson and Elizabeth Seale (eds), Rural voices: Language, identity, and social change across place. Lexington Press. 91-103.
• Castro, Andy and Pan Xingwen. 2014. Sui Dialect Research [水语调查研究]. Guiyang: Guizhou People's Press.
• Stanford, James. 2016. Sociotonetics using connected speech: A study of Sui tone variation in free-speech style. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 2(1):48-81.
• Stanford, James. 2009. "Eating the food of our place": Sociolinguistic loyalties in multidialectal Sui villages. Language in Society 38(3):287-309.
• Stanford, James. 2008. A sociotonetic analysis of Sui dialect contact. Language Variation and Change 20(3):409-50.
• Stanford, James. 2008. Child dialect acquisition: New perspectives on parent/peer influence. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(5):567-96.
• Stanford, James. 2007. Sui Adjective Reduplication as Poetic Morpho-phonology. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 16(2):87-111.
• Wei Xuecun and Jerold A. Edmondson. 2003. Sui (Shui)-Chinese-Thai-English Dictionary. Salaya, Thailand: Mahidol University.

Sui language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• ABVD: Sui word list
• Wei Xuecun, Jerold A. Edmondson, Somsonge Burusphat (eds). 2003. Sui (Shui)-Chinese-Thai-English Dictionary. Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University, 395 pp. ISBN 974-9574-54-0.
• Jerold Edmondson, John Esling, Jimmy Harris, and James Wei, "A phonetic study of the Sui consonants and tones" Mon–Khmer Studies 34:47–66
• Fang-Kuei Li, "The Distribution of Initials and Tones in the Sui Language", Language, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1948), pp. 160–167, available through JSTOR.
• Sui language at UPSID
• Castro, Andy and Pan, Xingwen (2015): Sui dialect research. SIL: Guiyang. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.3537607)