A Lexical Study of the Personality Traits of the Yi People in a Community Context

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_37How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Yi people; Comprehensive Dictionary of the Yi Language; Lexical Hypothesis; Personality Traits

Abstract

Language is a powerful force in shaping personality and a key pathway to understanding it. Recognizing the personality traits of various ethnic groups through language can foster more harmonious, deeper interaction, communication, and integration. This study uses the “Comprehensive Dictionary of the Yi Language” as its lexical corpus for the Yi people. By strictly adhering to standardized procedures for selecting personality adjectives, it explores the Yi people’s personality traits through language, thereby promoting interaction, exchange, and integration between the Yi and other ethnic groups. First, 2,900 personality terms were selected from the Yi Dictionary and classified individually. Subsequent analysis revealed that terms describing stable personality traits numbered 27, accounting for only 0.93% of the total personality terms, while evaluative terms totaled 634, representing 21.86% of the total; terms describing facial expressions and emotional states totaled 295, accounting for 10.17% of the total; terms describing human behavior, activities, and physical movements totaled 1,944, accounting for 67.03% of the total; subsequently, the “Yi Personality Terminology Content Validity Evaluation Form” was developed, and through expert review, 265 terms with high content validity were selected. Finally, using these 265 terms, the “Yi Ethnic Group Personality Trait Adjective Assessment Form” was developed. A sample of 269 Yi participants was selected to evaluate these terms for preference, meaningfulness, and familiarity, yielding the 10 adjectives with the highest and lowest scores for each criterion. The study indicates that the characteristics of Yi personality vocabulary exhibit cross-ethnic consistency with those of other ethnic groups, providing strong evidence for the “multicultural unity” pattern of the Chinese nation.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Liqin Du
AU  - Yisong Yang
AU  - Long Chen
AU  - Chang Xu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - A Lexical Study of the Personality Traits of the Yi People in a Community Context
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 334
EP  - 350
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_37
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_37
ID  - Du2026
ER  -