Until ca. 1950, the endonym Lolo was written with derogatory characters in Chinese, and for this reason has sometimes been avoided. Shafer (1966–1974) used the term "Burmic" for the Lolo-Burmese languages. The Chinese term is Mian–Yi, after the Chinese name for Burmese and one of several words for Tai, reassigned to replace Lolo by the Chinese government after 1950.[1]
The position of Naxi (Moso) within the family is unclear, and it is often left as a third branch besides Loloish and Burmish. Lama (2012) considers it to be a branch of Loloish, while Guillaume Jacques has suggested that it is a Qiangic language.
The Pyu language that preceded Burmese in Burma is sometimes linked to the Lolo-Burmese family, but there is no good evidence for any particular classification, and it is best left unclassified within Sino-Tibetan.
Three Bailang songs were reportedly recorded in Chinese characters in the 1st century, and survive in quotations from the 7th century. The transmission through Chinese makes interpretation difficult, but most authors believe the language to be Lolo-Burmese or a close relative.[5]
Guillaume Jacques & Alexis Michaud (2011)[6] argue for a Burmo-Qiangic branch with two primary subbranches, Na-Qiangic (i.e. Naxi-Qiangic) and Lolo-Burmese. Similarly, David Bradley (2008)[7] also proposes an Eastern Tibeto-Burman branch that includes the two subbranches of Burmic (a.k.a. Lolo-Burmese) and Qiangic.
Bradley (1997, quoted in Peiros 1997) gives the following classification for the Lolo-Burmese languages. In later publications, in place of Loloish, David Bradley instead uses the term Ngwi based on a conservative autonym in the Sanie language.[8]
Lama (2012) recognizes 9 unambiguous coherent groups of Lolo-Burmese languages, whereas Bradley considers there to be 5 groups (Burmish, Southern Ngwi, Northern Ngwi, Southeastern Ngwi, and Central Ngwi).
^Löffler, Lorenz G. (1966). "The contribution of Mru to Sino-Tibetan linguistics". Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. 116 (1): 118–159. JSTOR43369896.
^Bradley, David (1997). "Tibeto-Burman languages and classification"(PDF). Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, Papers in South East Asian linguistics. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 1–71.
^Bradley, David. 2008. The Position of Namuyi in Tibeto-Burman.
^Bradley, David (2005). "Sanie and language loss in China". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 2005 (173): 159–176. doi:10.1515/ijsl.2005.2005.173.159.
Bradley, David (1997). "Tibeto-Burman languages and classification"(PDF). Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, Papers in South East Asian linguistics. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 1–71.
van Driem, George (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill. ISBN978-90-04-12062-4.
Huang, Bufan [黄布凡], ed. (1992). A Tibeto-Burman Lexicon (TBL) [藏缅语族语言词汇]. Beijing: Minzu University Press [中央民族学院出版社].
Lama, Ziwo Qiu-Fuyuan (2012). Subgrouping of Nisoic (Yi) Languages (PhD thesis). University of Texas at Arlington. hdl:10106/11161.
Satterthwaite-Phillips, Damian. 2011. Phylogenetic inference of the Tibeto-Burman languages or On the usefulness of lexicostatistics (and "Megalo"-comparison) for the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
