page_title: Ersu language
section_title: Loanword Phonology
hierarchical_section_title: Ersu language / Phonology / Loanword Phonology
caption_attribution_description: English: an example of the phonological changes between Mandarin and Ersu in adaptation
context_page_description: The Ersu language proper is a Qiangic language spoken in western Sichuan, China. It is the most widely spoken of the three Ersu languages. There are 13,000 speakers according to Sun.
context_section_description: There is strong evidence that Tibetan and Yi words have been borrowed into Ersu without adaptation. Some of the words have exactly the same pronunciation as the Tibetan or Yi words. There is some contention as to whether or not this is good enough evidence to say that Ersu people belong to the Tibetan nationality.
  There is also a large amount of Mandarin words borrowed into the Ersu language. These words mainly come from the dialect in Mandarin that carries the tone systems of Southwestern Mandarin varieties, henceforth referred to as "Mandarin". According to Zhang, the majority of Mandarin loanwords occur in the texts relevant to modern times such as long conversations, procedural and autobiographical narratives. In a historical context, Mandarin is hardly seen, even as late as the 1980s.
  Ersu generally utilize  Mandarin words in two different ways:
  Mandarin is directly borrowed without any adaptation, and is rather obvious. This leads to the use of nasalized vowels that are borrowed from Mandarin to appear in Ersu everyday speech, though it is not originally a part of their phonemic inventory.
  They assimilate Mandarin into Ersu by making the former sound very much like Ersu. This applies to words that have been borrowed for a longer time, and also the speech of the older Ersu speakers over 70 years old. Below are methods that Ersu adapts Mandarin words.
  Nasals in the coda of Mandarin are deleted when adapted, most likely due to the lack of codas in native Ersu.
  When there are diphthongs in Mandarin that are also in Ersu, they are directly borrowed. However, for the diphthongs that are in Mandarin and not in Ersu, only one of the vowels in the Mandarin diphthong is kept. Usually only the back vowel is kept. ex. /uo/ in Mandarin is adapted to keep the /o/ in the Ersu lexicon.
  /ə/ and /ɤ/ in Mandarin always becomes /o/ in Ersu.
  All the tones in Mandarin are transformed to the mid level tone in Ersu.
  Two notable exceptions are the adaptations of  Mandarin words for  'duck' and 'goose'. They are open syllables in Mandarin, but are adapted with a nasalized coda and a stressed glottal stop at the onset of the word.
caption: Mandarin adaptation into Ersu
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