Yi

Yi, also called Loloish or Ngwi, is the eastern arm of the Lolo-Burmese branch of Tibeto-Burman, comprising fifty to a hundred tonal languages spoken mainly in Yunnan, with outliers in Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangxi and neighbouring mainland Southeast Asia. Nuosu, or Northern Yi, is the prestige variety.

Chinese sources trace the Yi to the Wuman tribes of eastern Yunnan, who formed the warrior caste of the Nanzhao kingdom founded in 738; its elite are thought to have spoken an early form of Nuosu. Nanzhao fell in 902 and was succeeded by the Bai-ruled Dali kingdom, under which most Yi lived until the Mongol conquest of 1253.

Yi societies kept their own logosyllabic script, developed independently of Chinese by at least the thirteenth century and guarded by bimo priests, who used it to hand down ritual and genealogical texts.