Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 9, 2026

Samei language

Samei is a Loloish language of Yunnan, China closely related to Sani. It is spoken in 47 villages in and around Ala Township 阿拉彝族乡, located in eastern Guandu District just southeast of downtown Kunming, as well as in 7 villages in western Yiliang County (Ethnologue). There are about 20,000 speakers out of an estimated 28,000 ethnic population.

Last revised
Jun 9, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
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161 w
Citations
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Source
Wikipedia ↗
Samei
Native toChina
EthnicityYi
Native speakers
20,000 (2007)1
Language codes
ISO 639-3smh
Glottologsame1240
ELPSamei

Samei (autonym: sa21 ni53) is a Loloish language of Yunnan, China closely related to Sani.2 It is spoken in 47 villages in and around Ala Township 阿拉彝族乡, located in eastern Guandu District3 just southeast of downtown Kunming, as well as in 7 villages in western Yiliang County (Ethnologue). There are about 20,000 speakers out of an estimated 28,000 ethnic population.

Documentation

Ye (2020) contains a detailed description and 3,000-word list of Samei.3

Samei lexical data is also documented in Satterthwaite-Phillips (2011).4

References

References

  1. Samei at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. Bradley, David (2005). "Sanie and language loss in China". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 2005 (173): 159–176. doi:10.1515/ijsl.2005.2005.173.159.
  3. Ye, Kangjie 叶康杰 (2020). Samei Yiyu diaocha yanjiu 撒梅彝语调查研究. Kunming: Yunnan Ethnic Publishing House 云南民族出版社. ISBN 978-7-5367-8338-6.
  4. Satterthwaite-Phillips, Damian. 2011. Phylogenetic inference of the Tibeto-Burman languages or On the usefulness of lexicostatistics (and "Megalo"-comparison) for the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.