Halang, also known as Salang, is a

Bahnaric language The Bahnaric languages are a group of about thirty Austroasiatic languages spoken by about 700,000 people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Paul Sidwell notes that Austroasiatic/Mon–Khmer languages are lexically more similar to Bahnaric and Katui ...

of the

Mon–Khmer The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...

branch of the

Austroasiatic language family The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are th ...

. It is spoken in the southern Laotian province of Attapu by approximately 4,000 people and in the neighboring Kon Tum Province of

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

by approximately 13,000 people. In Vietnam, Halang is spoken in Đắk Na Commune, Đắk Tô District, Kon Tum Province (Lê et al. 2014:175)Lê Bá Thảo, Hoàng Ma, et al.; Viện hàn lâm khoa học xã hội Việt Nam - Viện dân tộc học. 2014. ''Các dân tộc ít người ở Việt Nam: các tỉnh phía nam''. Ha Noi: Nhà xuất bản khoa học xã hội. In more specific usage, ''Halang'' refers to the dialect spoken in Vietnam, whereas ''Salang'' refers to the dialect spoken in Laos. Halang or Salang may also serve as an ethnonym for members of the

ethnic group An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

that speak the language. However, in Vietnam, the Halang speakers are officially classified as a subgroup of the larger Sedang ethnicity.

References

Bahnaric languages Languages of Laos Languages of Vietnam {{AustroAsiatic-lang-stub