Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2020
The Rgyalrong languages are a group of unwritten non-Tibetic languages spoken in north-western Sichuan Province, China. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the Brag-bar (a dialect of Situ Rgyalrong) kinship terminology at the synchronic level, and then by using both internal reconstruction and comparative method, we attempt to explain the directionality of both formal and semantic changes in the Brag-bar terminology. Thus we demonstrate that the present kinship system of Brag-bar (Situ) originates from a system with Omaha skewing.
We would like to express our gratitude to Guillaume Jacques, who has read every version of this paper and provided valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank Lai Yunfan, Philippe Ramirez, Stephen Morey, Jesse Gates, Gong Xun and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Finally, we would like to thank Thomas Pellard, who generously shared the LaTeX codes for the kinship diagrams.