The Baima language (/pêkê/, Chinese 白马语 báimǎyǔ, ISO-639 code bqh) is a little-studied Tibeto-Burman (Bodic or Himalayish) language spoken in the southwestern part of the People's Republic of China. Approximately 10,000 people, who traditionally reside in three counties in Sichuan Province (Pingwu 平武, Songpan 松潘 [in Written Tibetan, hereafter WT, zung chu], and Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟 [WT gzi rtsa sde dgu]), and in one county in Gansu Province (Wenxian 文县), speak the Baima language (see Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute 1980; Zeng & Xiao 1987), see Figure 1. 1 The largest concentrations of Baima speakers are in Baima Township (白马乡, Baima /tôpû/) of Pingwu County, and in Tielou Township (铁楼乡) of Wenxian County.1 According to Suzuki (2015: 120), Baima is also spoken in a few villages in Boyu township (博峪, WT bod yul) of Zhouqu County (舟曲县, WT 'brug chu rdzong), which borders on Jiuzhaigou County. He notes, however, that there are no more speakers of Baima in the younger generation in Zhouqu.The basic vocabulary of Baima is mostly of Tibetan origin (Zhang 1994a(Zhang , 1994bHuang & Zhang 1995), and Baima also exhibits characteristic phonological features of Tibetic languages (see Tournadre 2005Tournadre , 2014). 3 At the same time, Baima is not mutually intelligible with other Tibetic varieties in its neighborhood, and it is considered a distinct language by its speakers. The linguistic affiliation of Baima-as a Tibetic language (Zhang 1994a, 1994b; Huang & Zhang 1995) or a Bodic language distinct from Tibetic languages (H. Sun 1980, 2003; Nishida & Sun 1990; H. Sun et al. 2007)-has long been disputed, mainly due to the controversy surrounding the ethnic classification of the Baima group (see Chirkova 2007 for an overview). Previous work on Baima has mostly concentrated on the variety spoken in Baima Township of Pingwu County. In Baima, this variety is called /tôpû kʰa̠ kê/. It has been described in Nishida & Sun (1990), Huang & Zhang (1995), H. Sun et al. (2007), and Feng (2017) (all in Chinese), and it is also the focus of the present Illustration. In Pingwu County, Baima speakers are a minority, Chinese speakers making up the majority. Pingwu Baima is in contact with the local variety of Mandarin Chinese (which belongs to the Chengyu cluster 成渝小片 of the Chuanqin group 川黔片 of Southwestern Mandarin dialects, Li 2012: 85). To our knowledge, there are no longer any monolingual speakers of Pingwu Baima, as all age groups are bilingual in the local variety of Mandarin. Mandarin (both the local variety and the closely related Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China)also dominates the education system and work in public domains. As a result, Baima is mostly restricted to family and community events, and is therefore endangered.3 Some common phonological innovations of Tibetic languages include palatalization of *ty, *ly, *sy, *tsy, e.g. WT gcig 'one', Baima /t͡ ʃî/ [t͡ ʃʒ ̩ ɘ]; WT chi 'what', Baima /t͡ ʃʰə/; WT shing 'tree, wood', Baima /ʃʰè/; WT bzhi 'four', Baima /ʒə/. A commonly cited...