Fonds Katia Chirkova: XUMI

The Xumi 旭米 language (/ʃʉ⁵⁵hĩ⁵⁵ ke⁵⁵tɕɐ⁵⁵/ ‘the language of the Shu people’) is spoken by approximately 1,800 people who reside along the banks of the Shuiluo River (水洛河) in Shuiluo Township (水洛乡) of Muli Tibetan Autonomous County (木里藏族自治县; smi li rang skyong rdzong in Written Tibetan). This county is located in the South-West of Sichuan Province (四川省) in the People’s Republic of China. Despite the small geographical area occupied by the group and the small amount of speakers, the language can be divided into two varieties with restricted mutual intelligibility: (1) the variety of the upper reaches of the Shuiluo River (or Upper Xumi, spoken in the village of Lanman); and (2) the variety of the lower and middle reaches of the Shuiluo River (or Lower Xumi, spoken in the villages of Xinzang, Pingweng, Liangbao, and Mianbang). The two varieties differ both in their segmental inventories and phonotactic constraints. At the lexical level, the two varieties have loanwords from different donor languages. The present collection includes personal narratives, traditional stories, and conversations from speakers representing both sub-varieties of Xumi. A large number of audio and video files are accompanied by annotations in IPA and Mandarin Chinese.