Tujia

Tujia is a tonal Sino-Tibetan language of the Wuling Mountains, where Hunan, Hubei and Guizhou meet Chongqing, usually treated as an isolate within Tibeto-Burman, its genealogy obscured by heavy borrowing from Chinese. It splits into two mutually unintelligible forms, Northern and Southern, whose speakers call themselves Bizika, meaning native dwellers; the Chinese name Tujia likewise means local families.

The Tujia are often traced to the Ba people of the ancient kingdom of Ba, which flourished on the upper Yangtze from 600 BCE until its conquest by Qin in 316 BCE. They appear in imperial records under the name Tujia from the fourteenth century.

Ruled by hereditary tusi chieftains under the Ming, their communities kept their speech at home while using Chinese for administration, and the language never developed a script of its own.