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Language Contact in the Tea Horse Road Region and the Dual Diffusion of the ‘Tea’ Lexeme ― Focusing on a Geolinguistic Reinterpretation

  • The Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China
  • Abbr : JSLCKC
  • 2026, (79), pp.3~36
  • DOI : 10.16874/jslckc.2026..79.001
  • Publisher : Korean Society of Study on Chinese Languge and Culture
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : January 10, 2026
  • Accepted : February 20, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

Roh, Hye-jeong 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper reinterprets the lexical data from Wang Feng and Wei Jiaoqiao (2017) and Wang Feng (2025) from a geographical and historical perspective, analyzing various language contact phenomena centered around the Tea Horse Road. Specifically, it aims to distinguish the Tea-Horse Road trade routes into the ‘Southern Inland Trade Zone’ and the ‘Northern Main Trade Zone,’ and to clarify how the distribution of ‘tea’ vocabulary within each zone corresponds to actual historical trade patterns. While the lexical form for ‘tea’ in world languages is generally derived from the Chinese character ‘茶’, languages distributed within the Tea-Horse Road region of China, such as Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, and Mon-Khmer, exhibit a pattern where the indigenous ‘la’-type form coexists with the Chinese-derived ‘tsha’-type (non-la) form, or diverges regionally. Analysis in this study confirms that within the southern trade sphere centered on southwestern Yunnan, the la-type vocabulary, derived from the Proto-Tibeto-Burman ‘leaf (la)’, spread horizontally among ethnic groups. This suggests the existence of an indigenous trade network formed prior to Han Chinese involvement. Conversely, in the northern trade sphere connecting Sichuan and Tibet, vocabulary derived from the later Han Chinese ‘tsha’ type predominates. This paper interprets this as a result of state-led vertical language diffusion following the establishment of the ‘Tea-Horse Office’ (茶馬司) and the expansion of government-sponsored trade after the Song Dynasty. Furthermore, the high phonological similarity between ancient Chinese tea-related variants—such as ‘槚, 蔎, 瓜蘆, 皋蘆’—and their equivalents in minority languages indicates that early Chinese itself was influenced by these languages. This demonstrates that linguistic contact along the Tea-Horse Road was not a one-way Sinicization process, but rather a dynamic interplay where ‘upward diffusion of indigenous languages (*la)’ and ‘downward diffusion of Chinese (*tsha)’ overlapped, varying by route and period.

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