“Hey! What a coincidence. You where are going?”

“I some vegetables and fruit need to buy for my family. How about you?”

“Oh, I my key lost at the office. I there need to go back.”

This is a direct translation of an example of the daily conversations that take place in Yajiang County, Sichuan Province, China. You may be noticing something peculiar about these sentences - the grammatical order doesn’t seem quite right to an English speaker. But for Yajiang locals, this is the typical sentence structure when speaking in their native language Daohua. The etymology of this language’s name hints at the intentionality of this inverted grammar, as Daohua literally translates to “inverted words”. This highly suggests one key feature of the language --- the typical structure of a sentence in Daohua follows the Subject-Object-Verb framework instead of the more common Subject-Verb-Object arrangement, which is typical in English and Mandarin. Specifically, if you need to say, “I eat something” in the Daohua, then the sentence should be modified to “I something eat”. That is why when I first heard a Daohua sentence, I had no idea about its meaning.

This unique spoken language has been widely used within Yajiang County since the early Republic of China. Prior to the Qing Dynasty, the Yajiang region was primarily inhabited by Tibetan settlers, largely self-governed and isolated from the influence of the Han. However, as a result of the Qing Regime’s policy on the bureaucratization of native officers in Southwest China, this region fell under direct Qing governance. Gradually, numerous Han people migrated to Yajiang and began to communicate, work, and intermarry with the local Tibetans. This ethnic and cultural mingling between the two demographics had given rise to eclectic cultural representations including Daohua, a new Chinese-Tibetan mixed language.

The first detailed documentation of Daohua was in Yeshes Vodgsal Atshogs’ book, A Study of Daohua. According to Dr. Atshogs, while Daohua’s lexicon and phonetic structure are almost entirely derived from Chinese, its grammatical structure is similar to that of Tibetan, which, just like most of the Sino-Tibetan languages, generally utilizes the Subject-Object-Verb framework.  This Sino-Tibetan language family, to which Daohua belongs, originated more than 7,000 years ago in northern China, and it is widely accepted that the first languages in this family originally used the Subject-Object-Verb framework as well. Approximately 6,000 years ago, the original Sino-Tibetan languages began to branch off into several dialects, which led to a division between the Han branch and Tibeto-Burman branch, and a formation of the Yangshao culture and later the Majiayao culture. Daohua and other Chinese-Tibetan mixed languages, such as the Wutun language, mark a unique cultural and linguistic fusion between Hans and Tibetans. Unfortunately, both Daohua and Wutun have been identified as endangered languages in China, and preservation is challenging.

Despite Daohua being a mother tongue of Yajiang citizens for a long time, it is currently spoken by only about 2,000 people within the county. One reason for this discouraging trend is that this language is passed down solely by oral transmission. Furthermore, as Mandarin and Tibetan are more widely used in and out of the county, while Daohua is spoken almost exclusively within the county, Daohua may be deemed a less practical language to learn. When I talked with younger residents of Yajiang, many admitted that they cannot speak Daohua proficiently despite being native to the region. Additionally, I had spoken once with a young girl from Yajiang, who said that her grandmother was the only one in her family who could speak Daohua fluently—both she and her parents have difficulty stringing together a full sentence in Daohua. When asked about strengthening the inheritance of Daohua to younger generations, some people from Yajiang expressed that they did not believe there was any value in doing so, as this language is of low universality compared with the more popular languages of Yajiang, Mandarin and Tibetan.

Daohua, a language that represents the fusion between two distinct peoples, appears to be diminishing in prevalence as a result of the ever-increasing globalization and interdependence between nations and regions. From a principal mother tongue to a marginalized dialect, the fall of Daohua sounds a somber note: what is fading away is not only a language but also the derivatives of language that define a culture. Folk ballads and poetry fade into indecipherable memories of a bygone age.

With a desire to support the protection and revitalization of Daohua, I interviewed Mr. H, who works at the Yajiang County Education Bureau. According to him, Daohua is neither currently included in the curriculum of Yajiang schools nor projected to be set within formal coursework. Per national regulations, local primary and secondary schools use unified Mandarin textbooks in the core curriculum, while Tibetan language courses are also offered. Daohua is currently faced with limited opportunities for younger generations to learn the language in addition to the general lack of interest to learn, and insufficient awareness among the local people about the value of Daohua and the tragedies of the extinction of the language.

Due to the Speak-Mandarin campaign, Mandarin has become the most widely used language in China. Although cross-regional communication and understanding are largely improved due to this, it cannot be neglected that many minority languages, and even some cultures, are gradually dying out in China. According to Dr. Atshogs, as languages and cultures have a reliance on one another, the disappearance of unique minority languages often forebodes deculturation. Understanding the depths and ramifications of this pattern is a necessary first step to preserving diversity and culture within communities, whether in Yajiang or in any part of the world.