"Sanie presents a typical example of language shift in progress. Firstly, there are doubtless many residents of the Kunming area with unremembered Sanie ancestry. In the villages closest to the city, Chejiabi, Shiju and Zhaozong at the foot of Xishan, the language is dying; only those over sixty speak well, with some younger people able to understand a bit; but children do not know the language at all, even though their grandparents, who are bilingual, often care for them. These villages have long been in contact with the Han; the main road from Kunming to Dali used to pass right through the centre of Chejiabi. They are now completely surrounded and outnumbered by Han Chinese and well-integrated into the urban economy. However, at least in Chejiabi, the village leaders have recently started to identify more strongly as Yi, and have erected a village gate with characters in Reformed Yunnan Yi writing and a park with paintings of traditional Yi stories and inscriptions in these characters.

In the first villages in the mountains, such as Daxing and Huahongyuan, the youngest semi-speakers are young adults, but again children are not learning the language. These villages have been in close contact with the Han for many years. In the next ring of villages out, such as Baimei, Yuhua and those in northeast Gulu, closer contact with Han Chinese started after 1950 and Sanie is still used to a limited extent by children, but most are semispeakers. The most distant villages, such as those in eastern Tuanjia, central Gulu, Anning and Fumin, are still relatively remote but have also started to have extensive contact with Han Chinese and not many young people speak Sanie fluently there." (p. 166-67)

There are no monolingual speakers in Sanie. Sanie is not used even in home domains (grandparents tend to speak Chinese to grandchildren).

"At the request of local authorities, we have devised a pinyin for Sanie which is intended to help in language maintenance efforts using the Reformed Yunnan Yi Script with the Sanie pronunciations ... The Yunnan Nationalities Commission is in favor of wider use of the Yi characters in school; this will be easier if young non-speakers can also be taught how to pronounce things in their parents' or grandparents' own local speech variety. Sanie teachers in some areas have welcomed this Sanie pinyin, and we hope it will help in their language maintenance efforts." (p.173-174)

In villages closer to Kunming the language is spoken only by the elderly, slightly further away only by adults, but furthest away a few children speak the language, which is being replaced by Chinese in the east and by Chinese and Nasu in the west.

Classified in the Yi nationality.