ABSTRACT
The indigenous Sui people of Guizhou Province, China, follow a strict custom of clan exogamy: husbands and wives must not be members of the same clan, and the wife moves permanently to the husband’s village at the time of marriage. As a result, these patrilineal villages are complex sociolinguistic environments involving a wide range of clans, many of which have distinctive dialect contrasts. Though mutually intelligible, Sui clan-level dialects have striking linguistic contrasts that include lexical variants (such as high-frequency words like the first singular pronoun), diphthong variants, and tone variants. Married women maintain the dialect features of their original home villages to a high degree, even after decades in the husband’s village. The role of clan as a social variable is also important in Sui child dialect acquisition. Prior work in other societies has suggested that children acquire the dialect features of their peers rather than their parents.
