A Phonological Sketch of Duoxu

This paper presents a preliminary phonological sketch of Duoxu, a critically endangered and virtually undescribed Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Sichuan Province, People's Republic of China. The sketch is based on lexico-phonetic data recorded from one speaker in 2013. It places special emphasis on the tonal system of Duoxu, with four lexical tones on monosyllabic words and 16 tonal patterns on disyllabic domains. The recently collected language data are compared to those in an earlier description of Duoxu by Huang and Yǐn (2012), which is based on data collected in 1990, with the aim of determining what changes occurred in the quarter of a century that separates the collection of data for the two sketches. All illustrative examples in the paper are accompanied by audio files to encourage further research and analysis of Duoxu, and to contribute to its preservation.