The mountains and valleys of Yunnan Province, in southwest China, are closer to Bangkok than they are to Beijing. Conquered by Kublai Khan for the Chinese throne over seven centuries ago, the region remains an economic hinterland. The province is slightly larger than Germany and is home to more than 15 million non-Chinese ethnic minority groups, who speak approximately a hundred distinct languages. Among those languages is Trung (Dúlóng in Chinese), spoken by fewer than 7,000 people in a single river valley 60 miles long, hard by Yunnan’s border with Burma and Tibet. For much of the past three years, I have been documenting Trung language and culture, supported by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the Himalayan Languages Project. Working first in Chinese and then haltingly in Trung, I recorded ghost stories and folksongs, studied rituals and conversations, and teased apart fine points of grammar. In 2009, I started compiling a Trung-Chinese-English dictionary together with three Trung collaborators: this is page 37 of nearly 400. The dictionary should be finished next year. It will be the first book ever written or published in the language.

The quiet dispute between Christians and Communists, which now splits families, villages, and clans, has consequences for the dictionary as well. Whose society and whose values should be reflected in the entries selected and the example sentences, those of the church or those of the Party village committee? And what about the last of the traditionalists, with their half-remembered spirits and nearly vanished rites?

“The place where the deer appeared”—the names of Trung villages, many ending in dvm55, often recall the original impulse of settlement. Hunters are said to have arrived first in search of game and decided to stay when they saw how well the corn grew. (Corn and potatoes are staple crops, deemed ancient: a sign of how deeply these New World imports penetrated the most remote corners of Eurasia back when little else did.) Shv31wa55tvng55 today, like most Trung villages, numbers fewer than one hundred people, who eke out an existence from farming, occasional work outside the valley, and state welfare (sacks of rice and, starting in recent years, meager allotments of cash). The traditional Trung means of subsistence—slash-and-burn agriculture, logging, and hunting—are now banned, at least in theory, in the name of environmental protection: the entire valley is the equivalent of a national park, though tourists are still rare. Overriding dozens of ancient Trung place names in the name of administrative convenience, Chinese officials have divided the valley into four townships: First Township, Second Township, and so on. The first road connecting the valley to the rest of the world opened in 1999; fewer than 100 miles long, it took longer to build than most of the country’s high-speed rail lines. The valley remains inaccessible most of the winter, snowed in, and travel between villages is still done largely on foot: small wonder that the Trung dialects of two neighboring townships can differ as much as British and American English. The long-term prospects for places like Shv31wa55tvng55 remain unclear, but change is accelerating. On my most recent visit, I saw brand-new blue roofs, made of corrugated iron, on most of the houses—the government had rebuilt them to showcase its “New Socialist Countryside” policy. The administrative center of the valley is growing into a proper frontier town, with one partially paved street, boarding houses for migrant laborers, a seedy pool room, and a few stores selling instant noodles, Mekong River beer, and hardware supplies. Han Chinese border guards, lonely and isolated, play pick-up basketball against some of the locals (basketball and pool are the two favored sports of rural China). There is even an occasional, makeshift “disco,” which began innocently enough but now harbors familiar scourges: drugs, prostitution, and HIV. I sat there once with my Trung friend and collaborator Mvng55 Ji55song55, shouting over a surreal mix of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese hits—he was choosing between the Party (his best chance of finding work) and conversion to Christianity, following his wife.

Unwritten and virtually unstudied, half the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers: few are likely to survive beyond this century. Among the Trung, the pressure to switch to Chinese is mounting: the influx o outsiders, the Chinese-geared education system, mass media, and the imperative to find work beyond the valle all demand it. What linguists call verbal art—storytelling, ritual language, eloquent speech, riddles, jokes, and so on—is disappearing fast, as are grammatical nuances, terms for flora and fauna unknown to science, and words like shvm53 “smooth torrent (in a river)”, wak55tu55 “confluence of a tributary with its parent river” and shong-31met55ni55 “the fifth day after today.” With enough paraphrasing and loanwords, any language can express anything, but the existence of precise, single terms reveals the deep priorities of a language’s speakers. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” is how the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson phrased it. The Trung dictionary project strives to capture and record these intricacies, however imperfectly, building a bridge between the language and the wider world that now threatens to subsume it. If nothing else, it makes Trung the equal of Chinese and English on the printed page, visible and palpable for the first time, giving speakers a shock of recognition and a surge of pride. To use the dictionary (whether in print, online, or eventually on a cell phone), the Trung will have to learn and embrace the orthography. Will the language ever be seen on signs, taught in classrooms, broadcast in the local media, represented in cyberspace? These possibilities still seem remote, although our audio and video recordings, together with the dictionary, photographs, and other materials, are now the nucleus of a small archive, half toolkit and half resource for future students. Although a negligible bulwark against the expansion of Chinese, it stands as a record of how men and women spoke in one valley, a finger dipped in the flux of language.