The Hlai languages ( zh, s=黎语, p=Líyǔ) are a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family spoken in the mountains of central and south-central

Hainan Hainan is an island provinces of China, province and the southernmost province of China. It consists of the eponymous Hainan Island and various smaller islands in the South China Sea under the province's administration. The name literally mean ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

by the Hlai people, not to be confused with the colloquial name for the Leizhou branch of Min Chinese ( zh, s=黎话, p=Líhuà). 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 The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

was adopted for Ha.

Classification

Norquest (2007) classifies the Hlai languages as follows. There are some 750,000 Hlai speakers. * Proto-Hlai **Bouhin ( ) – 73,000 **Greater Hlai ***Ha Em 哈炎 ( ) – 193,000 ***Central Hlai ****East Central Hlai – 344,000 *****Lauhut ( ) – 166,000, the basis of the literary language *****Qi 杞 (also known as ''Gei'') – 178,000 ******Tongzha ( ) – 125,000 ******Zandui ( ) – 29,000 ****** – 24,000 ****North Central Hlai – 136,500 *****Northwest Central Hlai – 62,500 ****** Cun 村语 (Ngan Fon, ) – 60,000 ****** ( ) – 2,500 *****Northeast Central Hlai – 74,000 ****** (Moifau) – 30,000 ******* *******Moyfaw ( ) ****** (''Zwn''; also known as ) – 44,000 ******* – 36,000 ******* – 8,000 Nadou is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the two villages of (in Town ) and (in Town ), in Dongfang, Hainan. Speakers refer to themselves as and are officially classified by the Chinese government as ethnic Han Chinese. (52,000 speakers) is a divergent Kra-Dai language with a Hlai superstratum and a non-Hlai substratum.

Reconstruction

The Proto-Hlai language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Hlai languages. Proto-Hlai reconstructions include those of Matisoff (1988), Thurgood (1991), Ostapirat (2004), and Norquest (2007).

Phonology

The following displays the phonological features of the modern Hlai dialects:

Consonants

* , mainly occur word-initially among various dialects. may also be realized as . *[], [] mainly occur among the Xifang dialects. * can also occur as an allophone of . * , , are pronounced as alveolo-palatal sounds , , , among other various dialects. * can have allophones as . * For a brief period of time Yuanmen distinguished and after became which soon merged with .Norquest (2007)
p. 106

Vowels

* Among other Hlai dialects, can have allophones of . * Vowel sounds and are common among the Baisha and Jiamao dialects. * occurs among some dialects.

History

Liang & Zhang (1996:18–21) conclude that the original homeland of the Hlai languages was the Leizhou Peninsula, and estimate that the Hlai had migrated across the Hainan Strait to Hainan Island about 4,000 years before present.

Notes

References

* *

External links

Bible recordings in various Hlai languages

ABVD: Proto-Hlai word list

Hlai-language Swadesh vocabulary list of basic words
(from Wiktionary'
Swadesh-list appendix

Hlai languages learning website
(both in Mandarin Chinese and English) {{Authority control Languages of Hainan