Jinghpaw (Jinghpaw ga, Jìngphòʔ gà, ဈိာင်ဖေါစ်) or Kachin is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sal branch spoken primarily in Kachin State, Myanmar; Northeast India; and Yunnan, China. The Jinghpaw (or Kachin) peoples, a confederation of several ethnic groups who live in the Kachin Hills, are the primary speakers of Jinghpaw language, numbering approximately 625,000 speakers. The term "Kachin language" may refer to the Jinghpaw language or any of the other languages spoken by the Jinghpaw peoples, such as Lisu, Lashi, Rawang, Zaiwa, Lhawo Vo, and Achang. These languages are from distinct branches of the highest level of the Tibeto-Burman family. Jinghpaw is written using a modified Latin alphabet; a Burmese alphabet is used by some speakers, but it has largely been phased out. Jinghpaw syllable finals can consist of vowels, nasals, or oral stops. The Turung of Assam in India speak a Jingpo dialect with many Assamese loanwords, called Singpho, which shares 50% lexical similarity with Jinghpaw.

Dialects

There are at least 16 Jingpoish (Kachinic) varieties (Kurabe 2014:59). The demographic and location information listed below is drawn from Kurabe (2014). Standard Jingpo and Nkhum are the best described varieties, whereas the Jingpoish varieties of India have been recently documented by Stephen Morey. Jingpoish varieties in northern Kachin State remain little described. The Ethnologue lists Duleng (Dalaung, Dulong ), Dzili (Jili), Hkaku (Hka-Hku), and Kauri (Gauri, Guari, Hkauri). According to the Ethnologue, Dzili might be a separate language, whereas Hkaku and Kauri are only slightly different. Other underdescribed Jingpoish varieties include Mungji and Zawbung. Shanke is a recently described language closely related to Jingpo, although its speakers identify themselves as Naga.

Southern

Small pockets of Jingpo speakers are also scattered across Gengma County 耿马县, including the following villages (Dai Qingxia 2010). Dai (2010) also includes 1,000-word vocabulary lists of the Yingjiang 盈江, Xinzhai 新寨, and Caoba 草坝 dialects.

Northeastern

Northwestern

Singpho (Northwestern Jingpoish) varieties of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, India include the following.

Internal classification

Kurabe (2014) classifies seven Jingpoish dialects as follows. The Southern branch is characterized the loss of Proto-Jingpo final stop *-k in some lexical items. The Northern branch is characterized by the following mergers of Proto-Jingpo phonemes (Kurabe 2014:60).

Grammar

Jingpo has verbal morphology that marks the subject and the direct object. Here is one example (the tonemes are not marked). The verb is 'to be' (rai).

Phonology

The following is in Standard Jingpo:

Consonants

Vowels

Tones

Jingpo has four tones in open syllables, and two tones in closed syllables (high and low). Tones are not usually marked in writing, although they can be transcribed using diacritics as follows:

Vocabulary

The Jingpo lexicon contains a large number of words of both Tibeto-Burman and non-Tibeto-Burman stock, including Burmese and Shan. Burmese loan words reflect two stratas, an older stratum reflecting the phonology of conservative written Burmese, and a newer stratum reflecting words drawn from modern Burmese phonology. The older strata consist of vocabulary borrowed from Burmese via Shan, which also exhibits the pre-modern phonology of Burmese vocabulary. Jingpo has also borrowed a large number of lexical items from Shan, with which it has been in close ethnolinguistic contact for several centuries. Jingpo, as the lingua franca in the northern highlands of Myanmar, has in turn been the source language of vocabulary into other regional languages like Rawang and Zaiwa.

Latin orthography

The Jingpo writing system is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 23 letters, and very little use of diacritical marks, originally created by American Baptist missionaries in the late 19th century. Ola Hanson, one of the people who created the alphabet, arrived in Myanmar in 1890, learnt the language and wrote the first Kachin–English dictionary.

Burmese orthography

Jingpo is also written in the Burmese alphabet.

Consonants

Vowels

[-a] is the inherent vowel in every syllable.

Other diacritics