Tai Languages Research Articles

Classifiers in Dimasa and (in-)definite marking

Abstract Dimasa (ISO 639-3 dis) is a Bodo-Garo language within the Tibeto-Burman family of languages. Like other Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India, it has a system of numeral classifiers which occur prefixed to their respective numerals. Across the dozen or so languages of Bodo-Garo, it has been noted that the classifier-numeral word can be placed either before or after the counted noun. The existence of numeral classifiers, as well as the clf-num order may have arisen in this area due to contact with Tai languages during the Ahom kingdom period from the 1200’s to 1800’s. In the Tai languages, classifiers precede the number “one”. By comparing occurrences of classifiers in Dimasa texts, it can be seen that the order N clf-num corresponds to definite nouns, while the order clf-num n marks indefinites. In addition to classifier placement, Dimasa definiteness is also marked by demonstratives, case marking, topic marking, and/or combinations of these strategies.

Сausal markers in Old Khmer

This paper considers causal markers in Old Khmer, the language of epigraphic 7th–15th century monuments found in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Consistently looking at the contexts of two lexemes, hetu and man, it ascertains that hetu (traceable to the Sanskrit noun “cause”) was used in the 10th–11th centuries as a specialized conjunction to introduce causal clauses. Modern Khmer has transformed hetu into the conjunction haet tae. Modern Khmer also widely uses haet in various consequence phrases (as against its merely sporadic occurrences in this meaning in Old Khmer). The conjunction man is another ancient causal marker, probably ascending to Old Javanese. In consistence with modern views on the emergence of causal markers, its causal function may have developed from its earlier temporal uses (“when”). Man is not found in Modern Khmer, having fallen out of use as early as in the Middle Khmer, the language of the 15th–18th century monuments. Our probe into causal constructions with hetu and man could not come up with any examples of Old Khmer constructions with dependent nominal causal phrases, while these are common in Modern Khmer, though evidently — as derivatives of dependent causal clauses. The paper also looks into the potential emergence paths for the modern causal markers prʊəh and daoj(-saː). Our conclusion is that the registered occurrences of the Old Khmer ancestors of these words (roḥ and toy, respectively) provide no definite clue as to their evolution or the exact period when they or their derivatives assumed the causal function. Nevertheless, the existence of their modern Thai (pʰrɔ́ʔ, dûay) and Lao (pʰɔ̄ʔ, dûay ) counterparts suggests that the Old Khmer also used the respective causal markers that were later borrowed by Tai languages.

Thai tonal confusion patterns in the production of L1 Chinese Zhuang students

Abstract This paper examines Thai tonal confusion patterns in two sample groups of Chinese Zhuang Students with the research hypothesis that the experimental group who possess Zhuang language experience as native speakers (C+Z) would have better tonal performance in the process of assigning tone for each lexical word than the control group who have no experience of Zhuang (C−Z). The hypothesis focuses on the C+Z′ familiarity of tone split which is a common feature of the tonal system in Tai languages as their L1 positive transfer. The tone split patterns of their L1 and L2 were explored and contrasted in the comparative Gedney’s tone box. The C+Z and the C−Z were asked to pronounce 60 words of two wordlists, one of which contained Zhuang-Thai cognates to stimulate the familiarity of their L1 tone split pattern. The findings show that Thai tonal confusion patterns in the two groups present differently. The accuracy rate of the C+Z is significantly higher than that of the C−Z overall and especially in T3 and T5. Their confusion rate on the Zhuang-Thai cognate wordlist was not higher than the non-cognate wordlist. All of the aforementioned indicates the positive transfer of the L1 Zhuang in the students’ Thai L2 tonal acquisition.

New research on the adoption and transformation of Chinese writing

Abstract A major study has been released on the emergence in East Asia of the logographic, or logo-syllabic, writing systems inherited from Chinese writing, attending primarily to the adaptations and innovations implemented in Korea, Vietnam, Japan and by speakers of the Tai languages of Southern China and Northern Vietnam. It contributes to our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms, of how speakers of different languages transformed the character script. The book points to overarching research problems concerning the relationship between language and writing, how aspects of this relationship are based on universal principles of learning exemplified in bilingual literacy. The research questions presented by the author will ultimately help us better understand literacy learning and the nature of reading and writing ability in general.

The Sinitic Languages: A Contribution to Sinological Linguistics by Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler

Reviewed by: The Sinitic Languages: A Contribution to Sinological Linguistics by Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler Stephen Matthews (bio) The Sinitic Languages: A Contribution to Sinological Linguistics. By Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler. Translated by Mieczysław Jerzy Künstler and Alfred Franciszek Majewicz. Abingdon and New York: Routledge (Collectanea Serica, New Series 1), 2019. The title of this book already signals its perspective: a linguist looking at 'Chinese' from outside China, and from Europe in particular, perceives not a language but a family of languages, comparable in their diversity to the Romanic or Germanic language families (see Chappell 2016 for recent work from this perspective). Indeed, in a new twist on an old comparison, the author asserts that 'Pekinese and Cantonese are more distant than Icelandic and Southern German' (p. 40). Having published the original book in Polish in 2000, the author was working on a revised English version at the time of his death in 2007. Künstler's text breaks off at the end of chapter 8, at which point Alfred Majewicz takes over the translation, without attempting the updating that Künstler was pursuing in his English version. The book is based on lectures given at University of Warsaw by Künstler, who is described as a passionate lecturer as well as a 'severe and demanding professor' (p. xiii). Both the passion and the severity come across in the book, which presents a relentless critique of Chinese linguistics, especially as practised in China. Linguists are taken to task for numerous errors of method and argumentation. In reconstructing proto-Sino-Tibetan, for example, numerals are commonly [End Page 294] used as evidence when they are more likely to be early borrowings than true cognates (p. 63). The alternative approach presented here begins with a shock announcement: no characters are to be used! The reasoning is that 'The links between language and writing are often overestimated' (p. 11), 'Chinese writing was never a good tool to note the language' (p. 40) and 'the Chinese cannot liberate themselves from looking at the language through Chinese characters' (p. 82). These arguments overlap with the hanzi filter as proposed by Wang (1996)—the effect whereby those aspects of Chinese which are not represented in characters tend to become invisible or distorted. Given this policy, even the book's intensive discussions of Archaic and Ancient Chinese present examples in modern pinyin readings (and without tone markers). The editor has relented to the extent of providing characters in an index. Yet the exclusion of characters becomes absurd at times, such as when the editor notes that the Cantonese mathai 'water chestnut' is written with two characters meaning 'horse hoof', which remain unprinted due to the ban (p. 207). The author begins with a discussion of typological, genetic and areal affinities. Having adopted the deconstruction of Sino-Tibetan (ST) by Benedict (1972), he proceeds to split Sinitic from Tibeto-Burman (TB). The relationships between Sinitic and neighbouring families, including TB, are thus seen as areal and typological rather than genetic. The author often delves into the areal links between Tai languages and Sinitic, but the Mongolian and Manchurian languages 'lie outside of our scope of interest' (apparently on typological grounds: p. 13). Consequently, he does not consider the Altaicization hypothesis of Hashimoto (1976), whereas Hashimoto's hypothesis of a Miao-Yao substrate in Min is discussed (p. 216). Indeed, Künstler shows a particular interest in the southern minorities and their impact on southern varieties. The Cantonese term mathai 马蹄'water chestnut', for example, is analysed as containing the Tai prefix ma- 'fruit' (p. 31), while the interpretation of 马 蹄 as 'horse hoof' is treated as a folk etymology (p. 236). Tai-Kadai languages are rather misleadingly referred to as Thai in the book; similarly, yuè 越 is rendered 'Vietnamese' when the text makes better sense when understood as referring to the languages of the băi yuè 百越 peoples of south China (p. 216). [End Page 295] The organization of the book follows the history of Chinese from the oldest texts to the 20th Century, before returning to the theme of diversity within the Sinitic family. This section begins with a chapter surveying dialect groups, entitled...

Origin of the Tai-Phake community of the Brahmaputra valley and their acculturation with the greater Assamese society

The present paper tries to throw some light on the origin of Tai-Phake community living in selected pockets of Assam and deal with the change in life and culture of Tai-Phake community of Namphake village. The Tai-Phake people were originally from the Hu-kwang valley of Myanmar. They migrated in and around 1775 from Hu-Kwang valley to Assam in search of better life. To sustain their lives the people settled around the river side because of availability of water for various works. Water also helps them for cultivation of crops i.e. agriculture, which was their main occupation. The river plays an important role in the Tai-Phake community of Namphake village. The process of modernization is observed with the help of comparison in lifestyle, food, traditional practices among the older generation and new generation. Many of the festivals have vanished because of the irregular practices. There is influence in the language of the Tai-Phake community because of acculturation with different culture like the Assamese, Bengali etc. Monastery was considered to be the place where people worship, cultural gathering and educational hub but in the present period it is used only for worshipping and considered as a tourist hub. The people of Namphake village has tried to hold on to their original customs and beliefs and has preserved it by arranging evening classes of tai languages for the people, wearing traditional dresses during festival and marriage festivals and marriages. Conclusions are drawn based on the analysis of the collected information during the survey time.

Length contrast of high vowels in the Thai language of the Sukhothai period

Abstract In an attempt to study the length distinction of high vowels in Sukhothai Thai, this research compares an analysis of the graphemic system and spelling variations found in the Sukhothai inscriptions with the phonemes in Proto-Southwestern Tai (PSWT) and donor languages of the loanwords. The result indicates that short and long high vowels in PSWT behave differently in phonemic-graphemic mapping. Short vowels are mapped with ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ whereas long vowels with ⟨ī⟩, ⟨ï̄⟩, and ⟨ū⟩. In addition, the existing spelling variations are limited to specific kinds of words, namely: open-syllable words, loanwords, and function words, all of which are susceptible to variation in spelling. These findings attest to the existence of length contrast in Sukhothai Thai.

Tai Dam orthographies

AbstractTai Dam [blt] is a Southwestern Tai (< Kra-Dai) language spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China, and Thailand with approximately 750,000 speakers (Simons & Fennig 2017). The Tai Viet script has been used for centuries to write Tai Dam and other Tai languages. Because the Tai Viet script is not taught in schools, however, some Tai Dam readers prefer to use adaptations of the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies for writing Tai Dam. This paper describes Tai Dam orthographies in the Tai Viet, Lao, and Roman scripts. Particular focus is given to the way writers have faced the challenge of tonal mismatch between Tai Dam and Vietnamese or Lao by borrowing tone marking devices from one script to another, and to the sociolinguistic implications of these tone marking systems.

Khamti Shan anti-ergative construction

Abstract It is widely recognized that Khamti Shan is unique among Tai languages in evidencing a basic (A)OV word order, quite likely due to extensive language contact with Tibeto-Burman languages. Much less recognized in Khamti Shan is that some functional objects take a postposition marker, revealing a striking, but not necessarily unexpected, resemblance to a Tibeto-Burman-like anti-ergative construction. The deictic mai² ‘here’ grammaticalizes an anti-ergative function in which it acts as a marker for certain monotransitive ‘objects’ which are analyzed as pragmatically foregrounded referents in the information structure of the sentence.

Proto‑Tai reconstruction of ‘maternal grandmother’ revisited

Abstract The word ‘maternal grandmother’ presents irregular modern forms in Tai languages. It is ta:jB1 in most Northern Tai (NT) varieties, ta:jA1 in most Central Tai (CT) varieties, na:jA2 in most Southwestern Tai (SWT) varieties, and ja:jA2 in Standard Thai. Li (1971) reconstructs the proto-form of this word as *na:jA , positing that the later forms changed by analogy with semantically similar words. This paper discusses two alternative hypotheses *ta:jA and *ta:jB , and argues that the proto-form was *ta:jB . The analysis indicates that the sound changes of this word in Tai languages are caused by the “contamination” in kinship terms with paired semantic contents in CT/SWT, and by dissimilation from the otherwise homophonous word ‘to die’ in SWT. As a result, the proto-form of ‘maternal grandmother’ *ta:jB is preserved in the vast majority of NT and a cluster of CT. In most CT/SWT the original *B tone changed to *A tone, and then in SWT the initial *t- underwent further change to *n- in order to avoid homophony with the taboo word ‘to die’. This issue of homophony arose only in this branch due to the merger of *t- and *tr- (or *p.t-). This proto-form *ta:jB is supported by historical evidence and other non-Tai languages in the Daic family. Other exceptional irregularities in some CT languages are also discussed as they are crucial to the determination of the *ta:jB hypothesis. Analogous examples from several Tai varieties also support the occurrence of aberrant development due to taboo avoidance.

Textiles and Supernatural Power: A Tai Belief System

This paper focuses on textiles (monk's robes and funeral shrouds) and supernatural formulae created by the Tai of Lan Na (Northern Thailand) and the Shan States (Myanmar). The term supernatural formula is used to describe a magical prescription that incorporates visual material with some form of verbal communication. Visual material includes representations of spirits, magical diagrams (yantra) and texts written in ancient Tai scripts and verbal communication involving incantations in Pali and Tai languages. Formulae are created in the context of a Tai magical-religious belief system that draws on the power of Buddhism and Nature, spirits and healing, scared objects and astrology, cosmology and numerology. This belief system has enabled the development of a distinct Tai material culture of which textiles are one aspect. A srā, meaning a craftsperson or artisan (Burmese: saya, Thai: paw maw or paw acharn), uses the belief system to invoke spirits to bring good luck and to create protection against evil spirits that bring bad luck. Monk's robes are a source for protection and healing generated through the power of Buddhism. Funeral shrouds draw on power from a wider source that includes elements of the Tai magical belief system.

Multiple Meanings of the Pronoun/Haw/In Tai Lue

In many languages, personal pronouns are used to imply characteristics of speakers and social relationships between participants (Agha 2007). This is particularly true of members of the Tai language family, such as Zhuang (Kullavanijaya 2009), Standard Thai (Cooke 1968; Palakornkul 1972; Simpson 1997), Standard Lao (Enfield 1966; Compton 2002), Kham Mueang and Tai Lue (Rhekhalilit 2010). A number of studies of Southwestern Tai languages have found that the first person plural pronoun /haw/ or /raw/ can be used in several contexts, apart from referring to a group of speakers. For example, the pronoun /raw/ in Standard Thai indexes intimacy between participants when being used by particular individual speakers. The current paper investigates the Tai Lue first person plural pronoun and how it can be used in wider contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it aims at analyzing the pronoun /haw/ spoken in three dialects of Tai Lue, namely Tai Lue Chiang Mai (TLC), Tai Lue Luangphrabang (TLL), and Tai Lue Xishuangbanna (TLX). The data were collected through Labovian sociolinguistic interviews (1984), by which 27 informants were asked to narrate a story on controlled topics, and through participant observation. The analysis shows that the three selected dialects of Tai Lue concur in their use of the pronoun /haw/ as first person plural pronoun. However, it is found that each dialect uses pronoun the /haw/ with different shades of meaning when being used by individual speakers. Two dialects, TLC and TLL, tend to use the pronoun /haw/ to index intimacy while talking to addressees of younger age or lower social status. In TLX, pronoun /haw/ seems to be different in that it is exclusively used by monks. In conclusion, this study describes sociolinguistic use of the pronoun /haw/ in Tai Lue. It can be used either with unmarked first person plural meaning or first person singular meaning with some social indicates such as intimacy between participants and the status of monkhood.

Layers of Chinese Loanwords in Protosouthwestern Tai as Evidence for the Dating of the Spread of Southwestern Tai

The current ethno-linguistic landscape of mainland Southeast Asia is a result of the spread of Tai speakers from southern China. This study examines Chinese loanwords in Proto-Southwestern Tai, the hypothetical ancestor of all modern Southwestern Tai varieties and proposes a dating of the spread of Southwestern Tai languages. By comparing the reconstructed Proto-Southwestern Tai forms with corresponding Chinese forms, four layers of Chinese loanwords existed in Proto- Southwestern Tai, namely Pre-Later Han, Later Han Chinese, Early Middle Chinese, and Late Middle Chinese layers. These layers indicate that Proto-Southwestern Tai was in contact with Chinese at least until the Tang era. In collaboration with non-linguistic evidence, this paper therefore proposes that Southwestern Tai languages began to spread southward sometime during the eighth and the tenth centuries CE.

Variation and Change of the Phrae Pwo Karen Vowels and Tones Induced by Language Contact with the Tai Languages

This paper aims to analyze and compare the acoustic characteristics of the vowels and tones in the Phrae Pwo Karen spoken by three generations. The data was collected at Khangchai Village in Wang Chin District, Phrae Province. A wordlist of Pwo Karen vowels and tones was recorded directly on to computer using Adobe Audition version 2. Fifteen female informants were divided into three groups: those over 60 years old, those 35-50 years old and those under 25 years old. The total number of test tokens was 405 for vowel analysis, and 810 for tone analysis. The fundamental frequencies and formant frequencies were measured using Praat version 5.1.43.

Sinification of Zhuang place names in Guangxi, China: a GIS‐based spatial analysis approach

Zhuang, the largest minority language in China, is the label given to a variety of Tai languages and dialects spoken mostly in Guangxi. As a result of the process known as Sinification or Sinicisation stemming from the influx of Han soldiers and settlers moving in from many directions, but primarily the north, many Zhuang place names (toponyms) were changed to Han or pronounced with a Han accent or spelled in Chinese in such a way as to obscure the original Zhuang form. The objectives of this paper are to (1) construct a GIS database of toponyms in Guangxi at the township, county and prefecture levels from a comprehensive toponymical dictionary series of China; (2) analyse the spatial distribution of Zhuang vs non‐Zhuang toponyms and its association with environmental factors; and (3) examine the historical evolution of toponyms to better understand the process of Sinification. Results show that Zhuang toponyms have the highest concentrations in the southwest Twin‐Rivers Basin and the western mountainous area, and decline gradually towards the east. Zhuang toponyms are better preserved in areas that are more remote from major transport routes and major cities, and at higher ground level and with a somewhat steeper slope. Analysis of the limited number of toponyms with time stamps reveals that the Zhuang toponyms on contemporary maps are older in the west but more recent in the east. We speculate that in eastern Guangxi, with larger Han settlements for a longer period, older Zhuang toponyms were likely to be obliterated. The centroids of Zhuang and non‐Zhuang toponyms converge towards the centre of Guangxi over time, reflecting the impact of increasingly integrated Sino‐Zhuang settlement patterns.

The Tai-Kadai languages (review)

Reviewed by: The Tai-Kadai languages David B. Solnit The Tai-Kadai languages. Ed. by Anthony V. N. Diller, Jerold A. Edmondson, and Yongxian Luo. (Routledge language family series.) New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. 704. ISBN 9780700714575. $345 (Hb). [End Page 712] What do we expect from a language-family handbook? Linguists not specializing in the language family might expect to acquire a sense of its shared features and range of diversity in at least the core areas of phonology, morphosyntax, and diachrony, with perhaps some additional information on semantics and sociocultural context, among others. Specialists might expect a conspectus of the current state of research as well as some indication of new directions. One way to achieve these goals is to present a matched set of sketches of languages and language groups following a uniform outline, supported by overview chapters on more general topics. The volume under review takes a different tack: it presents a mixture of language sketches, overviews, and analyses of selected topics either in single languages or across several. There is wide variation among chapters in length and in depth of analysis. My view is that this approach also succeeds, although unfortunately the book suffers from problems in editing and production. The Tai-Kadai family of languages has also been called Kadai and Kra-Dai, as deftly explained by editorAnthonyV. N. Diller in Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’(3–8). The termsTai, Thai, and (Ka/Kra-)Dai are easily confused. Furthermore, Thai is often used for several languages spoken in Thailand (e.g. Southern Thai, Central Thai). To avoid confusion, some authors use Siamese to designate the standard language of modern Thailand, and I follow that practice here. As background to subsequent discussion, readers should know that (i) major subdivisions of the family are Tai, Kam-Sui (sometimes grouped with the foregoing as Kam-Tai), Hlai (Li), and Kra; and (ii) Tai has been divided by Li (1977) into Northern, Central, and Southwestern subgroups. The center of diversity for this language family is in southern China (Guangxi, Guizhou, Hainan), while the center of population is in Thailand and Laos. Those countries are also the center of political prominence, in that the Southwestern Tai languages—Siamese and Lao—are the only ones that have the status of national languages. So, it is not surprising that these two languages at the southern extreme of the family’s area are the earliest studied and the best known. More recent linguistic study then worked its way up the family tree and northeastward, first to the Northern and Central Tai languages of Guangxi and northern Vietnam, then to the Kam-Sui languages of Guangzi (Guizhou and Hunan), and finally to the smallest and arguably the earliest splits off the line of descent, Hlai (Li) of Hainan, Gelao of Guizhou and Guangxi, Laha of northern Vietnam, and a number of others. The volume under review is not free of a weighting toward the southern languages, especially Siamese of course, but it makes a commendable effort at redressing the balance. Diller’s two chapters, ‘Introduction’ (Ch. 1) and ‘Resources for Thai language research’ (Ch. 3), are a pleasure. The section on terminology in Ch. 1 is as good a presentation of this vexed topic as I have seen anywhere. Ch. 3 elegantly combines (i) guiding the reader through a hefty number of published works (there is a twenty-eight-page list of references) on all aspects of Siamese linguistics with (ii) setting forth a quite complete basic sketch of Siamese phonology, syntax, semantics, diachrony, and more. Many chapters consist of or include sketches of individual languages. Space limitations prevent me from describing all of them, so I single out two. Based on the author’s own first language, a Northern Tai variety spoken at Fengshan, Yongxian Luo’s chapter, ‘Zhuang’ (317–77), represents this heterogeneous grouping, which covers both the Central Tai and the Northern Tai spoken in Guangxi province. The sixty-one-page description is quite extensive, and includes tidbits such as a list of compounds headed by body-part terms like ‘throat’ and ‘heart’ that designate emotions and temperaments. This is possibly the most extensive description of a Northern Tai language...

A typology of readings of Chinese characters in traditional Zhuang manuscripts

The Old Zhuang Script is an instance of a borrowed Chinese character script. Zhuang is the current designation for the northern and central Tai languages spoken in Guangxi in southern China. On the basis of a corpus of traditional texts, as recited by traditional owners, this article presents a typology of Zhuang readings of the standard Chinese characters in these texts. While some categories represent phonetic or semantic readings of Chinese characters, others correspond neither semantically nor phonetically to Chinese graphs, and often involve serial borrowing. The implications of this typology for the study of writing systems, and the Chinese writing system in particular, would seem to be considerable.

Adjectives in Thai: Implications for a functionalist typology of word classes

Tai languages are often described as “lacking” a major lexical class “adjectives”; accordingly, they and other area languages are frequently cited as evidence against adjectival universality. This article brings the putative lack under examination, arguing that a more complete distributional analysis reveals a pattern: overlap is highest among semantically peripheral adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to both classes crosslinguistically, and lowest among semantically core adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to only one or the other class. Rather than “lacking” adjectives, data from Thai thus in fact support functional-typological characterizations of adjectival universality such as those of Givon (1984), Croft (2001), and Dixon (2004). Finally, while data from Thai would fail to falsify an adaptation of Enfield's (2004) Lao lexical class-taxonomy (in which adjectives are treated as a verbal subclass) on its own terms, this article argues that in absence of both universally-applicable criteria for the evaluation of categorial taxonomies crosslinguistically and evidence for the cognitive reality of categorial taxonomies so stipulated, even this more limited sense of a “lack” of adjectives in Thai is less radical a challenge to adjectival universality than has sometimes been supposed.

Geographic patterns of Zhuang (Tai) kinship terms in Guangxi and border areas: a GIS analysis of language and culture change

Historically-speaking, centuries of interactions between Han Chinese newcomers from the north of China and indigenous Tai-speaking ethnic minorities in the south have left deep, indelible traces in the language and culture of the latter and raise questions of identity and language policy in modern times. The language and culture in this study is Zhuang, one of many Tai languages and the largest minority language in China today. Using kinship terms as an example, we employ the analytical tools of Geographic Information System (GIS) to map and analyze the spatial pattern of sinification of kinship terms and attempt to explain the process of cultural and linguistic interaction that may have led to such distribution in the Zhuang domain. We use published data on Zhuang kinship terms from thiry-four representative locations in Guangxi and border areas (four in eastern Yunnan and one in western Guangdong) and semi-quantify them according to their pronunciations: three for Han-like pronunciations, one for more clearly Zhuang, and two for linguistic forms in between. The spatial pattern of kinship term sinification scores based on interpolation of the sampling locations shows that high degrees of sinification are located in areas close to the coast or international border with Vietnam, with gentle land slope and close proximity to major transportation hubs, reflecting the importance of both physical features and economic development in those areas in facilitating interactions between the two cultures in the sinification process. The degree of sinification of kinship terms also varies with their positions in a family kinship tree, perhaps reflecting Han social customs and male dominance in society more than traditional Tai kinship systems, which are generally more bilateral in nature.

Animate classifiers in Tai languages

This article aims to study animate classifiers in six Tai languages, namely, Central Thai, Lao, Tai Lue, Shan, Bouyei, and Northern Zhuang. The focus is on social factors such as register choice, age, kinship, gender, social standing, and social attitudes as determinants of Tai animate classifiers which are further categorized into human and non-human classifiers.