RESEARCH ARTICLE The genetic assimilation in language borrowing inferred from Jing People Xiufeng Huang 1 * | Qinghui Zhou 1 * | Xiaoyun Bin 1 | Shu Lai 1 | Chaowen Lin 1 | Rong Hu 2,3 | Jiashun Xiao 4 | Dajun Luo 4 | Yingxiang Li 4 | Lan-Hai Wei 5 | Hui-Yuan Yeh 6 | Gang Chen 4 | Chuan-Chao Wang 2,3 1 College of Basic Medical Sciences, Youjiang Medical University for Nationalities, Baise, Guangxi 533000, China 2 Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China 3 International Medical Anthropology Team, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China 4 WeGene, Shenzhen 518040, China 5 Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris 75214, France 6 School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang 639798, Singapore Correspondence Chuan-Chao Wang, No. 422, Siming South Road, Xiamen, Fujian, China. Email: wang@xmu.edu.cn and Xiufeng Huang, No. 98, Chengxiang Road, Baise, Guangxi, China. Email: hxflcw@163.com Funding information The Construction Project for Promoting Technological Innovation of Guangxi Universities for the Laboratory of Physical Characteristics of Guangxi Minorities, Grant Number: Gui[2015]5; Nanqiang Outstanding Young Talents Program of Xiamen University Abstract Objectives: 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 lan- guage 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. Materials and Methods: 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. Results: Our data revealed that the Jing people are genetically similar to the populations in south- west 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. Discussion: 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. KEYWORDS gene flow, Jing people, language borrowing, population admixture 1 | INTRODUCTION The Jing people form a relatively small population that lives mostly in the three islands of Wutou, Wanwei, and Shanxin on the southern tip of Guangxi off the southwestern coast of mainland China. They are officially recognized as one of the 56 ethnic groups in China. The his- torical literature records the ancestor of Jing people migrated from northern Vietnam to southwest China at the beginning of the 16th century (Olson, 1998). They are now living among the Han Chinese and Tai-Kadai speaking Zhuang people in nearby counties and towns. The language that Jing people speak is similar to Vietnamese but with a large number of variations, which are not only observed in pronuncia- tion and vocabulary but also in grammars. For example, the Jing lan- guage has adopted a tonal system from Tai-Kadai languages (Wei, 2006). The special population history makes Jing people as a very good example to investigate the relationships of language borrowing and genetic influence from surrounding populations. Forster and Renfrew *Xiufeng Huang and Qinghui Zhou contributed equally to this work. 638 | V C 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ajpa Am J Phys Anthropol. 2018;166:638–648. Received: 9 November 2017 | Revised: 10 January 2018 | Accepted: 15 February 2018 DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.23449