The Pwo Karen language is one of the main groups of the
Karen languages
The Karen () or Karenic languages are tonal languages spoken by some seven million Karen people. They are of unclear affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages. The Karen languages are written using the Karen script. The three main branches ...
, alongside the
S'gaw Karen language
S’gaw, S'gaw Karen, or S’gaw K’Nyaw, commonly known as Karen, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by the S'gaw Karen people of Myanmar and Thailand. A Karenic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, S'gaw Karen is spoken by over 2 mill ...
and
Pa'O. The Pwo Karen language contains four different dialects, which are at best marginally mutually intelligible:
*
Eastern Pwo (code: kjp)
*
Western Pwo (code: pwo)
*
Northern Pwo (code: pww)
*
Phrae Pwo (code: kjt)
The people who speak the language are referred to by many names, notably "Pwo Karen" or simply "Karen". The people call themselves Ploan Sho. The Pwo Karen people have lived in the eastern part of
Burma
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...
for centuries, and in the western and northern parts of
Thailand
Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is bo ...
for at least seven or eight centuries. The population of “Pwo karen” is 1,525,300 in Myanmar.
The
endonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
is ''Phlou'' or ''Ka Phlou'' , meaning "human beings".
References
*Dawkins, Erin and Audra Phillips. 2009
''A sociolinguistic survey of Pwo Karen in Northern Thailand''. Chiang Mai: Payap University.
*Phillips, Audra. 2009
''Lexical Similarity in Pwo Karen'' In PYU Working Papers in Linguistics 5, Audra Phillips (ed.). Chiang Mai, Thailand: Payap University Linguistics Department.
*Kato, Atsuhiko. 2009
''A basic vocabulary of Htoklibang Pwo Karen with Hpa-an, Kyonbyaw, and Proto-Pwo Karen forms'' Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 4:169-218.
Karenic languages
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