Lisu language

Lisu (Fraser alphabet: ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴ, ꓡꓲ‐ꓢꓴ ꓥꓳꓽ or ꓡꓲꓢꓴ; Latin: Lisu ngot; Lisu syllabary: ; Chinese: 傈僳语; pinyin: Lìsùyǔ; Burmese: လီဆူဘာသာစကား, pronounced [lìsʰù bàðà zəɡá]) is a tonal Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan (Southwestern China), Northern Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand and a small part of India.

In China, the Lisu people are mostly found in Yunnan, the majority living mainly in Nujiang and Weixi,[2] but also in Baoshan, Dehong, Lincang, Chuxiong, Luquan and Dali.

In Sichuan, where they make a small minority, they also speak Lipo, and they are sometimes classified under the Yi nationality.

The more famous of the two is James O. Fraser, a British evangelist from the China Inland Mission.

was Sara Ba Thaw, a polyglot Karen preacher based in Myitkyina, Burma, who belonged to the American Baptist Mission.

The script now widely known as the "Fraser alphabet" was finished by 1939, when Fraser's mission houses in the Lisu ethnic areas of Yunnan Province (China) received their newly printed copies of the Lisu New Testament.

However, it looks more different from the Chinese script than Chữ Nôm and Sawndip (Zhuang logograms).

The Fraser alphabet was officially recognized by the Chinese government in 1992, since which time its use has been encouraged.

In a few places in Myanmar in which Lisu is spoken, an orthography based on the Burmese alphabet has been developed and is taught to speakers and used in several publications and school books.

The subdialect Fraser first encountered also distinguishes a retroflex series, /tʂ tʂʰ dʐ ʂ ʐ/, but only before /ɑ/.

The vowels /u/ and /e/ trigger an offglide on preceding consonants, so /tu du te de/ are pronounced [tfu dvu tje dje].

It has been argued that the initial vowels /i e y u ɯ ɤ/ are phonetically [ji je fy fu ɣɯ ɣɤ], so initial consonants do not need to be posited in such cases (and marginal /f/ can be removed from the inventory of native words), or that they are phonemically /ʔV/, with glottal stop.