Contact and attrition in Sun Hongkai’s Anong: Complementary sources of change

0.0 Introduction Anong, a Tibeto-Burman language of Yunnan, is in its last generation—in 1999, there were 62 fluent speakers left, all over 50. The descriptive material on Anong is quite limited; what there is all comes from the work of Sun Hongkai, particularly 1988, 1999a, and a preliminary, but still useful wordlist (Sun ms.); a little additional data can be found in Sun Hongkai 1999b and Sun and Li 2001. Cf. also the beginning of Thurgood 2003, which describes the language setting more fully. In Sun 1999a, Sun makes a number of observations about the path of decline being followed by Anong, a language he has been documenting off and on since 1960. This piece augments that work, providing data to substantiate many of those observations and teasing out, where plausible, which changes represent largely internally-motivated attrition, which changes represent external contact with Lisu (and, secondarily, Chinese), and where and how the two mutually reinforce one another. In doing so, we draw on data from the Nungish languages (Trung (Dulong), Nujiang, and Rawang), the languages most-closely related to Anong and on data from Lisu and secondarily Chinese, the languages Anong speakers are most intimately in contact with.