Tonal spreading in Lataddi Narua
Fieldwork and wug-test experiments on the productivity of tonal spreading in a Naish language. Fieldwork was done with the assistance of Dr. Zihe Li in Peking University and Lankanam in Minzu University of China.
Lataddi Narua is a Naish (Sino-Tibetan) variety spoken in and around the Grass Sea (Cǎohǎi 草海), the marshland at the eastern end of Lugu Lake (Lúgūhú 泸沽湖), in Yanyuan County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan. It falls within the area of the Yongning dialect of “eastern Naxi”, but is spoken on the Sichuan rather than the Yunnan side of the lake. Its speakers call themselves Na [nɑ˩˥] and are officially classified as Mongolian (Měngzú 蒙族); the name Lataddi [lɑ˥tʰɑ˥di˥˩] means “the land of the Lata clan”.
Lataddi Narua is typologically unusual among Naish languages in having only two tone levels, with tones associated with whole lexical items rather than with individual syllables. For a description of its tone system, see Dobbs & Lǎ (2016).
My work asks how productive the language’s tonal spreading patterns are: when speakers encounter novel words, do they extend the spreading patterns found in the existing lexicon? I address this with wug-test experiments, based on fieldwork conducted in summer 2026 in Wuzhiluo, a sub-village of Boshu Village.
Status: data collected; analysis in progress.
Reference: Dobbs, Roselle & Lǎ Míngqīng 喇明清. 2016. The two-level tonal system of Lataddi Narua. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 39(1): 67–104. Open-access preprint.