Sawndip

The Zhuang are an ethnic group who mostly live in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. They form one of the fifty-six ethnic groups officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China. Their population, estimated at 18 million, makes them the largest minority in China. Zhuang is one of the array of northern Tai languages, and Sawndip is the Zhuang name for their own script, even though, curiously, it means “raw characters.” The script is used not only by the Zhuang, but also by the closely related Bouyei in Guizhou, China; Tay in Vietnam; and Nung in Yunnan, China, and in Vietnam. It has been used mainly by Zhuang singers and ritual specialists to record poems, scriptures, folk tales, myths, songs and play scripts. Traditional songs, or stories, are often adapted over time, and new works continue to be written to this day. After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, even communist revolutionary propaganda was written using Sawndip. In 1957, the Chinese government introduced an official, alphabet-based script, and that became the standard for official documents, laws and newspapers, but at least at the time it was largely ignored by the Zhuang themselves because it was based on a single dialect, not widely spoken.