Abstract

Research on the Jino (Jinuo) of Xishuangbanna has developed along several partly disconnected lines. Linguistic studies have described the grammatical and phonological structure of the language, ethnographic and ethnobiological work has documented oral traditions and ecological knowledge, and more recent digital-humanities research has explored computational approaches to cultural preservation. This review brings these strands into a single framework and argues that they are best understood as different levels of the same documentation problem. For a community whose traditional knowledge is transmitted primarily through speech, performance, objects, images, and place-based practice rather than through an inherited writing system, linguistic form and cultural content cannot be archived independently. The discussion first revisits the linguistic and sociocultural setting of Youle and Buyuan Jino, then examines the significance of acoustic work on tone sandhi in the Baka variety (Zhou 2024). It next considers oral and ecological knowledge as forms of situated heritage and evaluates the role of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation in organising text, audio, and image resources (Zhou and Lin 2026). The review concludes by proposing a research agenda centred on dialect-sensitive corpora, genre-aware annotation, provenance, and community governance. Taken together, the literature suggests that durable digital heritage for the Jino requires not simply more data, but a closer integration of phonological analysis, ethnographic context, and culturally accountable information infrastructure.