The Tujia language (Northern Tujia: Bifzivsar, /pi35 ʦi55 sa21/; Southern Tujia: Mongrzzirhof, /mõ21 ʣi21 ho35/; simplified Chinese: 土家语; traditional Chinese: 土家語; pinyin: Tǔjiāyǔ) is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken natively by the Tujia people in Hunan Province, China. It is unclassified within the Sino-Tibetan language family, due to pervasive influence from neighboring languages. There are two mutually unintelligible variants, Northern and Southern. Both variants are tonal languages with the tone contours of /˥ ˥˧ ˧˥ ˨˩/ (55, 53, 35, 21). Northern Tujia has 21 initials, whereas Southern Tujia has 26 (with 5 additional voiced initials). As for the finals, Northern Tujia has 25 and Southern Tujia has 30, 12 of which are used exclusively in loanwords from Chinese. Its verbs make a distincti