Yi Script & Syllables

Sichuan Yi, the language its speakers call ꆈꌠꉙ (Nuosu hxop), is written in a syllabary: each character is a whole syllable, consonant, vowel and tone together, and nothing inside it spells the parts. ꀈ at, ꀊ a and ꀋ ap are the same syllable in three tones and still three unrelated shapes. Nuosu syllables are simple, an optional consonant plus a vowel with no final consonant, which is why a fixed set of characters can cover the whole language. The word ꆈꌠ, Nuosu, the people's own name, is ꆈ nuo + ꌠ su; ꆈꌠꁱꂷ, Nuosu bburma, "Yi writing", adds ꁱ bbur and ꂷ ma.

The characters come from the traditional Yi script, kept for centuries by the bimo, the Nuosu ritual priests, in hand-copied books of prayers, genealogies and histories. That old script wrote words rather than plain syllables and had many local variants for the same word. The standardized Liangshan script was devised in 1974 and officially promulgated in 1980. It has 819 base signs plus 345 composite secondary-high-tone forms, for 1,164 syllable signs, and it is what schools, newspapers, road signs and the grid above use.

Unicode encodes 1,164 Yi syllables plus the iteration mark ꀕ. The 345 secondary-high-tone -x syllables have separate code points; most are formed from a mid-tone sign with an inverted-breve mark, as in ꀊ a and ꀉ ax. The iteration mark repeats the syllable before it, like 々 in Japanese.

How to read the Yi syllable chart: consonants, vowels and four tones

The chart follows Yi Pinyin, the official Latin spelling of Nuosu; Unicode Yi syllable names are based on it: ꁱ is YI SYLLABLE BBUR, ꆈ is YI SYLLABLE NUO. Each row is one consonant with one vowel, written as the label (bi, bie, ba, buo …), and the four columns are its tones. Some rows have only two or three, because not every syllable exists in every tone.

Nuosu has four tones, and Yi Pinyin writes them with a silent letter at the end: -t for the high tone (ꀖ bit), -x for the mid-high tone (ꀗ bix), nothing for the mid tone (ꀘ bi) and -p for the low falling tone (ꀙ bip). The t, x and p are never pronounced; they only mark the pitch. The vowels come in the order i ie a uo o e u ur y yr, where y is the buzzing vowel heard in Mandarin zi, and the r in ur and yr marks a tense vowel said with a tighter throat.

The consonants are grouped the way Yi Pinyin lists them, by where the sound is made, and each group runs plain, aspirated, voiced, then prenasalised: b p bb nb are p, ph, b and mb, d t dd nd are t, th, d and nd. An h before m, n or l makes it voiceless, a breathy sound English does not have: ꂚ hma beside ꂷ ma, ꆠ hla beside ꇁ la. Zh, ch, sh and r are retroflex and j, q and x palatal, much as in Mandarin Pinyin.

Yi punctuation, numbers and money

Yi has no punctuation of its own. Books and newspapers use the Chinese full-width marks: 。 to end a sentence, ， for a comma, 、 between items of a list, ？ and ！, “ ” around quotations and 《 》 around titles of books and songs. Lines run left to right, as in modern Chinese.

Numbers are written either with ordinary digits 1 2 3 or as words in syllables, such as ꋍ cyp, one, and ꑍ nyip, two. Money in Liangshan is the Chinese yuan, written ¥ or with the character 元, as in ¥50 or 50元.

How to type Yi script, and which fonts show it

The quickest way is to copy from the grid above: tap a syllable, then paste. To type Yi regularly you need a Yi input method; some, such as the Yi input method built into Windows, let you type a syllable's Yi Pinyin spelling, bbur or nuo, and turn it into ꁱ or ꆈ.

Windows has shipped a Yi font, Microsoft Yi Baiti, since Windows Vista, and the free fonts Noto Sans Yi from Google and Nuosu SIL from SIL International cover every syllable. If you see empty boxes instead of ꆈꌠ, the device lacks a Yi font; installing one of these fixes it.

All of this is ordinary Unicode text. Yi has been in Unicode since version 3.0 in 1999: the 1,164 syllables plus the iteration mark in the Yi Syllables block, U+A000 to U+A48F, and 55 Yi Radicals, U+A490 to U+A4CF, the components dictionaries use to index the characters (they are not written in running text, so they are not in this grid). In HTML a syllable can be written by its number, for example ꆈ for ꆈ.

Where Sichuan Yi is spoken

Sichuan Yi, also called Nuosu or Northern Yi, is spoken in the mountains of southern Sichuan, above all in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture around Xichang, and over the border in northern Yunnan. Estimates of Nuosu speakers run from about 2 million (2000 census) to nearly 2.8 million, centered in southern Sichuan 🇨🇳. Liangshan means "cool mountains" 🏔️; bilingual signs there show Yi script alongside Chinese characters.

The Yi are one of China's officially recognised ethnic groups, and "Yi" covers several related languages of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, many of them not mutually intelligible. The standard syllabary on this page is made for Nuosu; other Yi communities use their own traditional scripts or none. Nuosu belongs to the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman, together with Lisu, Lahu and Hani; see the Lisu and Tibetan collections for their scripts, the Chinese collection for the characters most Nuosu speakers also read, and the China collection for the flag and Chinese emoji.

The biggest Nuosu holiday is the Torch Festival 🔥, on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month in summer, with torch processions at night, bullfights 🐂, horse races 🐎, wrestling 🤼 and singing. The Yi New Year falls in late autumn, after the harvest.