The genetic assimilation in language borrowing inferred from Jing People

The Jing people are a recognized ethnic group in Guangxi, southwest China, who are the immigrants from Vietnam during the 16th century. They speak Vietnamese but with lots of language borrowings from Cantonese, Zhuang, and Mandarin. However, it's unclear if there is large-scale gene flow from surrounding populations into Jing people during their language change due to the very limited genetic information of this population.

We collected blood samples from 37 Jing and 3 Han Chinese individuals from Wanwei, Shanxin, and Wutou islands in Guangxi and genotyped about 600,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). We used Principal Component Analysis (PCA), ADMIXTURE analysis, f statistics, qpWave and qpAdm to infer the population genetic structure and admixture.

Our data revealed that the Jing people are genetically similar to the populations in southwest China and mainland Southeast Asia. But compared with Vietnamese, they show significant evidence of gene flow from surrounding East Asians. The admixture proportion is estimated to be around 35-42% in different Jing groups using southern Han Chinese as a proxy. The majority of the paternal lineages of Jing people are most likely from surrounding East Asians.

We conclude that the formation and language change of present-day Jing people have involved genetic assimilation of surrounding East Asian populations. The language borrowing, in this case, is not only a cultural phenomenon but has involved demic diffusion.