Buyang Erotic

The Buyang are one of the smallest peoples of the China-Vietnam borderlands, a few thousand villagers whose identity rests almost entirely on a language that the state does not count. Official China recognizes 56 nationalities and the Buyang are not among them. In Yunnan's Funing and Guangnan counties they are registered as Zhuang; across the provincial line in Napo County, Guangxi, the same people are filed under Yao. Neither label means much inside the village. What marks someone as Buyang is that their grandparents spoke Buyang, and that the neighbors know it.

That language belongs to the Kra branch of the Kra-Dai family, which makes it a distant cousin of Zhuang and Thai and a closer one of Gelao, Lachi and Qabiao, other small tongues scattered through the hills of Guizhou, Yunnan and northern Vietnam. Linguists usually describe several varieties rather than one: the villages around Gula township in Funing, Langjia in the same county, Paha in Guangnan, and Yalang, also written Yerong, in Napo. They differ enough that some researchers treat them as separate languages. For its size, Buyang has drawn outsized scholarly attention, because it preserves two-syllable word shapes that most of its relatives have worn down to one. Its words for eye and die sit strikingly close to their Austronesian counterparts, and they are regularly cited in the argument that Kra-Dai and the languages of Taiwan and the Pacific share a common ancestor.

The Kra speakers are widely thought to be an older layer of population in this region, settled before Tai-speaking groups, the ancestors of today's Zhuang, spread across it and absorbed most of what they found. The Buyang are what was left: pockets of farmers in karst hill country, surrounded by larger communities. The practical result is that nearly every Buyang adult is multilingual, using Zhuang in the market, Southwestern Mandarin with officials and in school, and Buyang at home, if at all. Children in several villages now grow up without it, and labor migration pulls young adults away for most of the year.

As far as it has been documented, religious life follows the regional pattern rather than any doctrine: household ancestor altars, offerings to local spirits and village guardians, and a festival calendar largely shared with the Zhuang. Buyang has no script of its own and no official standing. The community persists the way small upland peoples usually do, through kinship, a handful of villages, and a way of speaking that still sounds like nobody else's.