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Cun Language
Cun (Chinese: 村話; meaning "village language/speech") or Gelong (仡隆语 / 哥隆语) or Ngan-Fon is a Kra–Dai language spoken on Hainan Island. It is a part of the Hlai languages branch and has a lexical similarity with standard Hlai at 40%. The language has approximately 80,000 speakers, 47,200 of which are monolingual. Cun is a tonal language with 10 tones, used depending on whether a syllable is checked or unchecked. The speakers of this language are classified by the Chinese government as ethnic Han (same with speakers of Lingao). The Cun language is considered a dialect of the Han Li language. The Cun were originally Han Chinese people who migrated to Hainan Island and intermingled with the Li people The Hlai, also known as Li or Lizu, are a Kra–Dai-speaking ethnic group, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The vast majority live off the southern coast of China on Hainan Island, where they .... References * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hainan
Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly larger, is claimed but not controlled by the PRC. It is instead controlled by the Republic of China, a ''de facto'' separate country. makes up the vast majority (97%) of the province. The name means "south of the sea", reflecting the island's position south of the Qiongzhou Strait, which separates it from Leizhou Peninsula. The province has a land area of , of which Hainan the island is and the rest is over 200 islands scattered across three archipelagos: Zhongsha, Xisha and Nansha. It was part of Guangdong from 1950–88, after which it resumed as a top-tier entity and almost immediately made the largest Special Economic Zone by Deng Xiaoping as part of the then-ongoing Chinese economic reform program. Indigenous peoples like th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hlai Languages
The Hlai languages () are a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family spoken in the mountains of central and south-central Hainan in China by the Hlai people, not to be confused with the colloquial name for the Leizhou branch of Min Chinese (). They include Cun, whose speakers are ethnically distinct. A quarter of Hlai speakers are monolingual. None of the Hlai languages had a writing system until the 1950s, when the Latin script was adopted for Ha. Classification Norquest (2007) classifies the Hlai languages as follows. Individual languages are highlighted in bold. There are some 750,000 Hlai speakers. *Proto-Hlai ** Bouhin (Heitu 黑土) – 73,000 **Greater Hlai ***Ha Em 哈炎 (Zhongsha 中沙) – 193,000 ***Central Hlai ****East Central Hlai – 344,000 ***** Lauhut (Baoding 保定) – 166,000, the basis of the literary language *****Qi 杞 also known as ''Gei'' – 178,000 ****** Tongzha (Tongshi 通什) – 125,000 ****** Zandui (Qiandui 堑对) – 29,000 ** ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shangh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kra–Dai Languages
The Kra–Dai languages (also known as Tai–Kadai and Daic) are a language family in Mainland Southeast Asia, Southern China and Northeast India. All languages in the family are tonal languages, including Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages, 60% of whom speak Thai. ''Ethnologue'' lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch. Names The name "Kra–Dai" was proposed by Weera Ostapirat (2000), as Kra and Dai are the reconstructed autonyms of the Kra and Tai branches respectively. "Kra–Dai" has since been used by the majority of specialists working on Southeast Asian linguistics, including Norquest (2007), Pittayaporn (2009),Pittayaporn, Pittayawat. 2009. The phonology of Proto-Tai. Ph.D. Thesis, Cornell UniversityPeter Jenks and Pittayawat PittayapornKra-Dai Languages Oxford Bibliographies in "Linguistics", Ed. Mark Aranoff. New York: Oxford University Press. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hainan Island
Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slightly larger, is claimed but not controlled by the PRC. It is instead controlled by the Republic of China, a ''de facto'' separate country. makes up the vast majority (97%) of the province. The name means "south of the sea", reflecting the island's position south of the Qiongzhou Strait, which separates it from Leizhou Peninsula. The province has a land area of , of which Hainan the island is and the rest is over 200 islands scattered across three archipelagos: Zhongsha, Xisha and Nansha. It was part of Guangdong from 1950–88, after which it resumed as a top-tier entity and almost immediately made the largest Special Economic Zone by Deng Xiaoping as part of the then-ongoing Chinese economic reform program. Indigenous peoples like the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone (linguistics)
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 (linguistics), intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that 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, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from Pitch-accent language, pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Be Language
Be (), also known as Ong Be, Bê, or ''Vo Limgao'' (Mandarin 臨高 ''Lín'gāo''), is a pair of languages spoken by 600,000 people, 100,000 of them monolingual, on the north-central coast of Hainan Island, including the suburbs of the provincial capital Haikou. The speakers are counted as part of the Han Chinese nationality in census. According to ''Ethnologue'', it is taught in primary schools. Names Be speakers refer to themselves as ', with ' being the prefix for persons and ' meaning 'village' (Liang 1997:1). Liang (1997) notes that it is similar to the autonym ' (from ' 'person' and ' 'village'), by which Gelong 仡隆 (Cun language) speakers refer to themselves. Classification Be is a Kra–Dai language, but its precise relationship to other branches within the Kra-Dai family has yet not been conclusively determined. Hansell (1988) considers Be to be a sister of the Tai branch based on shared vocabulary, and proposes a ''Be–Tai'' grouping. Based on toponymic evidence f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Li People
The Hlai, also known as Li or Lizu, are a Kra–Dai-speaking ethnic group, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The vast majority live off the southern coast of China on Hainan Island, where they are the largest minority ethnic group. Divided into the five branches of the Qi (Gei), Ha, Run (Zwn), Sai (Tai, Jiamao) and Meifu (Moifau), the Hlai have their own distinctive culture and customs. Names 黎 (Lí), which was pronounced /lei/ in Middle Chinese is the Chinese transcription of their native name, which is Hlai. They are sometimes also known as the "Sai" or "Say". During China's Sui Dynasty, their ancestors were known by various names, including ''Lǐliáo'' (), a general term encompassing several non-Han ethnic groups in Southern China. The name Li first is recorded during the Later Tang period (923–937 CE). History Liang & Zhang (1996:18-21) believe that the original homeland of the Hlai languages was the Leizhou P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Languages Of China
There are several hundred languages in China. The predominant language is Standard Chinese, which is based on central Mandarin, but there are hundreds of related Chinese languages, collectively known as ''Hanyu'' (, 'Han language'), that are spoken by 92% of the population. The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang. According to the 2010 edition of ''Nationalencyklopedin'', 955 million out of China's then-population of 1.34 billion spoke some variety of Mandarin Chinese as their first la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
