Mandarin is a group of related Sinitic languages spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as the Northern dialects. Many local Mandarin varieties are not mutually intelligible. Nevertheless, Mandarin is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language. Spoken natively by an estimated 76 million people, it is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a first or second language for the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. As a result of Vietnamese emigration and cultural influence, Vietnamese speakers are found throughout the world, notably in East and Southeast Asia, North America, Australia and Western Europe. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas; as many as seventy percent of world languages may be tonal.
Lao, sometimes referred to as Laotian, is a Kra–Dai language of the Lao people. It is spoken in Laos, where it is the official language, as well as northeast Thailand, where it is usually referred to as Isan. Lao serves as a lingua franca among all citizens of Laos, who speak approximately 90 other languages, many of which are unrelated to Lao. Modern Lao (language) is heavily influenced by the Thai language. A vast number of technical terms as well as common usage are adopted directly from Thai.
Northern Thai, Lanna, or Kam Mueang is the language of the Northern Thai people of Lanna, Thailand. It is a Southwestern Tai language that is phonotactically closely related to Lao. Northern Thai has approximately six million speakers, most of whom live in the native Northern Thailand, with a smaller community of Lanna speakers in northwestern Laos.
Isan or Northeastern Thai is a group of Lao varieties spoken in the northern two-thirds of Isan in northeastern Thailand, as well as in adjacent portions of northern and eastern Thailand. It is the native language of the Isan people, spoken by 20 million or so people in Thailand, a third of the population of Thailand and 80 percent of all Lao speakers. The language remains the primary language in 88 percent of households in Isan. It is commonly used as a second, third, or fourth language by the region's other linguistic minorities, such as Northern Khmer, Khorat Thai, Kuy, Nyah Kur, and other Tai or Austronesian-speaking peoples. The Isan language has unofficial status in Thailand and can be differentiated as a whole from the Lao language of Laos by the increasing use of Thai grammar, vocabulary, and neologisms. Code-switching is common, depending on the context or situation. Adoption of Thai neologisms has also further differentiated Isan from standard Lao.
The Ahom language is a dead language that was spoken by the Ahom people that is undergoing revivalism. The Ahom people established the Ahom kingdom and ruled parts of the Brahmaputra river valley in the present day Indian state of Assam between the 13th and the 18th centuries. The language was the court language of the kingdom, till it began to be replaced by Assamese language in the 17th century. Since the early 18th century, there has been no native speakers of the language, though extensive manuscripts in the language still exists today. The tonal system of the language is entirely lost. The language was only partially known by a small group of traditional priests of the Ahom religion and it was being used only for ceremonial or ritualistic purposes.
The Shan language is the native language of the Shan people and is mostly spoken in Shan State, Burma. It is also spoken in pockets of Kachin State in Burma, in Northern Thailand and decreasingly in Assam. Shan is a member of the Tai–Kadai language family and is related to Thai. It has five tones, which do not correspond exactly to Thai tones, plus a "sixth tone" used for emphasis. It is called Tai Yai or Tai Long in the Tai languages.
Southern Thai, also known as Pak Thai or Dambro, is a Southwestern Tai language spoken in the fourteen provinces of southern Thailand as well as by small communities in the northernmost Malaysian states. It is spoken by roughly five million people, and as a second language by the 1.5 million speakers of Pattani and other ethnic groups such as the local Thai Chinese communities, Negritos, and other tribal groups. Most speakers are also fluent or understand the Central Thai dialects.
The Vietic languages are a branch of the Austroasiatic language family. The branch was once referred to by the terms Việt–Mường, Annamese–Muong, and Vietnamuong; the term Vietic was proposed by Hayes (1982), · who proposed to redefine Việt–Mường as referring to a sub-branch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường.
Tai Lue or Tai Lɯ, Tai Lü, Thai Lue, Tai Le, Xishuangbanna Dai is a Tai language of the Lu people, spoken by about 700,000 people in Southeast Asia. This includes 280,000 people in China (Yunnan), 200,000 in Burma, 134,000 in Laos, 83,000 in Thailand, and 4,960 in Vietnam. The language is similar to other Tai languages and is closely related to Kham Mueang or Tai Yuan, which is also known as Northern Thai language. In Yunnan, it is spoken in all of Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, as well as Jiangcheng Hani and Yi Autonomous County in Pu'er City.
Tsou is a divergent Austronesian language spoken by the Tsou people of Taiwan. Tsou is a threatened language; however, this status is uncertain. The speakers are located in the west-central mountains southeast of the Chiayi/Alishan area in Taiwan. The language is written in the Latin script.
This article is about the sound system of the Navajo language. The phonology of Navajo is intimately connected to its morphology. For example, the entire range of contrastive consonants is found only at the beginning of word stems. In stem-final position and in prefixes, the number of contrasts is drastically reduced. Similarly, vowel contrasts found outside of the stem are significantly neutralized. For details about the morphology of Navajo, see Navajo grammar.
Jalapa Mazatec is a Mazatecan language, as of 1990 spoken by ca. 15,000 people, one-third of whom are monolingual, in 13 villages in the vicinity of the town of San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz in the Tuxtepec District of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Egland (1978) found 73% intelligibility with Huautla, the prestige variety of Mazatec. Literacy in Jalapa is taught alongside Spanish in local schools.
The phonology of Burmese is fairly typical of a Southeast Asian language, involving phonemic tone or register, a contrast between major and minor syllables, and strict limitations on consonant clusters.
Proto-Tai is the reconstructed proto-language of all the Tai languages, including modern Lao, Shan, Tai Lü, Tai Dam, Ahom, Northern Thai, Standard Thai, Bouyei, and Zhuang. The Proto-Tai language is not directly attested by any surviving texts, but has been reconstructed using the comparative method.
Tai Daeng, Táy-Môc-Châu or Red Tai is the language of the Tai Daeng people of northwestern Vietnam and across the border into northeastern Laos. It belongs to the Tai language family, being closely connected with Black Tai and White Tai, as well as being more distantly related to the language spoken in modern Thailand, heretofore referred to as Siamese. Classified as part of the Thái official ethnic community in Vietnam and of the Phu Tai composite group in Laos. However, speakers in Vietnam tend to identify with Black Tai, or Tai Dam, thus denying that they are Red Tai.
Kʼicheʼ, or Quiché, is a Maya language of Guatemala, spoken by the Kʼicheʼ people of the central highlands. With over a million speakers, Kʼicheʼ is the second-most widely spoken language in the country after Spanish. Most speakers of Kʼicheʼ languages also have at least a working knowledge of Spanish.
Nuaulu is a language indigenous to the island of Seram Island in Indonesia, and it is spoken by the Nuaulu people. The language is split into two dialects, a northern and a southern dialect, between which there a communication barrier. The dialect of Nuaulu referred to on this page is the southern dialect, as described in Bolton 1991.
Proto-Min is a comparative reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Min group of varieties of Chinese. Min varieties developed in the relative isolation of the Chinese province of Fujian and eastern Guangdong, and have since spread to Taiwan, southeast Asia and other parts of the world. They contain reflexes of distinctions not found in Middle Chinese or most other modern varieties, and thus provide additional data for the reconstruction of Old Chinese.
