Kungnai people

Kungnai girl in Tsáng Xẹng prefecture.

The Kungnai people (Valley Kung: Kiong nài; Menghean: 켱내족, Kyŏngnae-jok) are a minority ethnic group in western Menghe. Most live in the Kungnai Semi-Autonomous Province, which is also home to large numbers of Lakkians and Meng. The term Kiong nài is an endonym from one of the region's minority dialects, and means "mountain people," in reference to the highland areas; it was transliterated into Menghean as Gwangnae (廣內 / 광내), meaning "in the broad [valley]." While formally classified as one ethnic group, the Kungnai are better regarded as a collection of tribes under an umbrella label, with different customs, dialects, and religious practices.

History

The Kungnai people historically lived in a collection of rice-farming tribal villages in the foothills of the Chŏnsan mountains. They had little in the way of organized statehood; groups of villages sometimes pledged allegiance to a local king, but these loose confederations lacked the bureaucratic governments which emerged in ancient Menghe and among the Lac people to the south, and most authority lay in the hands of customary village elders. The lack of a unified system of writing further hindered lawmaking and administration.

Nevertheless, despite their lack of organized government, the Kungnai proved adept at resisting invasions from the south and west. The Ayyubid Sultanate, which swept across Lac lands in the mid-11th century, repeatedly failed to extend its control into the Ǎ Dú valley, isolating the Kungnai from Shahidic cultural influences that shaped Lac culture in the same period. The Menghean Yi dynasty conquered Kungnai lands in the 14th century, but its actual administrative authority was in practice limited to the low-lying areas, with highland villages operating autonomously. Kungnai lands were among the first to break away during the Menghean Black Plague, and even after their re-integration into the Myŏn dynasty in the 16th century, they remained a site of repeated rebellions and uprisings. As late as the 1920s, after the region's integration into the Federative Republic of Menghe, small groups of Kungnai highlanders waged a protracted, low-intensity guerilla war for independence.

These periods of partial occupation forged a divergence between the valley Kungnai, also known as "familiar" Kungnai, and the "highland" or "unfamiliar" Kungnai. This distinction first appeared in Yi dynasty administrative records to measure tribes' progress in adopting "civilized" Meng customs, but it later spread to the Kungnai peoples themselves and remains commonplace today.

After the Menghean War of Liberation, the new government carved out a special Semi-Autonomous Province for the Kungnai people, as part of a series of concessions made to minority ethnic groups. Until that time, Menghean policy had regarded the western highlanders as a collection of separate tribes rather than a single ethnic group, and the official administrative dialect, Valley Kungnai, was unfamiliar to most of the population.

Religion

Kungnai musicians in lower Tô Siá prefecture.

Girls wearing traditional dress in Dài Nióng city.

Unlike the Lac people and Daryz, who converted to Shahidism in the 11th century, the Kungnai resisted conquest by the Ayyubid Sultanate and most continue to practice traditional polytheistic religions. Kungnai religions are generally regarded as distinct from Menghean Sindoism, even though some deities are shared with Meng people in western Suksan province.

Languages

The Kungnai people speak a family of languages which share some features and are for the most part mutually intelligible but should not be mistaken for a single language. Valley Kungnai, also known as Black Earth Kungnai, is the official dialect used in provincial government administration, but most Kungnai people grow up speaking the local dialect of their region. The Kungnai languages are part of the South Hemithean family, which also includes the Argentan and Innominadan native languages.

All Kungnai dialects have vowel tones, a trait shared with these languages as well as Lakkian and ancient Menghean. Valley Kungnai has seven such tones: high (á), mid (a), low (à), high-falling (â), mid-rising (ǎ), creaky (ạ), and mid-falling breathy (ậ).

For most of history, the Kungnai languages lacked a writing system. Some texts and artifacts dating to the 9th century show an early Kungnai script, known as the King Vuê Script, though it disappeared after the 11th century and archaeologists have not yet fully deciphered it. After the Yi conquest, government administrators and a few poets used Mengja characters or the Sinmun phonetic script, but these were always identified with the foreign occupation and gained no real local following. Efforts to create an alphabet flourished in the late 19th century, after Kungnai lands broke away from Myŏn-dynasty Menghe; two religious leaders devised independent writing systems in the 1860s, and each script enjoyed a limited following locally, though the Uzeri Sultanate worked to quash both.

In 1966, the Menghean government recognized the New Romanized Alphabet as the official script of the Kungnai people. This writing system, devised in the 1950s, uses the letters of the Latin alphabet, with diacritics over the vowels to indicate tones. It is used, with variations, for all Kungnai dialects, and has largely replaced the other script forms, which were in limited use.

Place names

In part because the Kungnai people lacked a centralized government and a widespread writing system, it was not customary to assign names to villages and regions. Certain landmarks, streams, and mountains might be given names, or named for local deities, but villages were customarily known only by a description of their location, and there were no organized territorial units above them.

When the Yi dynasty acquired the region in the 14th century, they created their own administrative system of prefectures and counties, and assigned Menghean-language names to them. Yi dynasty villages still had no organized government apart from a local headman or chieftan, and were largely unaffected, but large settlements bore Menghean names even when most of the locals did not speak Menghean.

During the late 1960s, as part of the transition to a Semi-Autonomous Province, the Menghean place names were supplemented by translations of the Meng characters' meaning into the standard dialect. Thus Hŭkto (黑土), the main valley known for its dark soil, became Ǎ Dú, "Black Earth," in local government documents. Many of the resulting translations were awkward, clumsy, and unnatural; some sources claim that native speakers were not given authority over place name corrections. Nevertheless, the resulting names stuck, and they remain in use today, as the occasional movements to change them run up against disputes over whether to use a local or standard dialect.

See also

• Lac people
• Daryz
• Meng