Jinghpaw loanword typology

Abstract

Jinghpaw is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northern Burma and adjacent areas of China and India. The language is known for both its conservative nature (e.g., comparative Tibeto-Burman linguistics) and the innovative nature of its speakers (e.g., social anthropology of highland Burma). In view of this duality, this paper explores the Jinghpaw lexicon asking whether it is conservative enough to shed great light on the reconstruction of the proto-language or whether it is innovative, having undergone a grand-scale lexical replacement under intensive contact. This paper addresses this question by measuring the lexical borrowing rate in the language based on the methodology laid out by the Loanword Typology (LWT) project. The results put Jinghpaw among average borrower languages in terms of the borrowability scale of the world’s languages. This study concludes that the Jinghpaw lexicon, especially its basic vocabulary, is relatively conservative, and the semantic fields affected by borrowing are mostly restricted to those that show high cross-linguistic susceptibility to intercultural influences. The results and discussion in this paper enable further understanding of comparative Tibeto-Burman linguistics and contact linguistics of northern Burma and beyond.