It was suggested that the Tai/ Shan, its sister groups (the Thai and the Lao) and its cousin groups (the Zhuang and the Kam Sui languages in China) came from a common Kadai root (one of the language groups of East and South Asia) 2000 years ago.  Although these groups were separated geographically and thus have been linguistically distanced they still share much in common.

Tai (Shan) language is a very tonal rich language. Tai people speak a 5 or 6 tone variety.  Most people only recognise that Tai (Shan) people speak a little differently from place to place.

Tai-Kadai languages

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

The Tai-Kadai languages, also known as Kadai or Kradai, are a language family found in Southeast Asia and southern China. They were formerly considered to be part of the Sino-Tibetan family, but are now classified as an independent family. It is sometimes suggested that they are related to the Austronesian language family, in a family called "Austro-Tai", or even part of a larger Austric superfamily. However, proposals for the Austric relationship do not conform to the comparative method.

Roger Blench suggests that, if the more limited Austro-Tai connection is valid, the relationship is unlikely to be one of two sister families, as has traditionally been proposed. Rather, he suggests that the Kadai languages may be a branch of Austronesian that migrated from the Philippines to Hainan, and from there spread to mainland China, where the Daic branch of Kadai was "radically restructured" under the influence of the Hmong-Mien languages and Chinese.

The diversity of the Tai-Kadai languages in southeastern China suggests that this is close to their homeland. The Tai branch moved south into Southeast Asia only in historic times, founding the nations that later became Thailand and Laos in what had been Austroasiatic territory.

Tai-Kadai languages

The classification of Edmondson & Solnit (1997) is as follows. Note however that there is no consensus classification. An alternative is given at Ethnologue.

References

• Edmondson, J.A. and D.B. Solnit eds. 1997. Comparative Kadai: the Tai branch. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
• Roger Blench (PDF format)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai-Kadai_languages"

Categories: Tai-Kadai languages | Tai peoples

The Tai languages are a subgroup of the Tai Kadai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai-Kadai languages, including Thai, the national language of Thailand, Lao or Laotian, the national language of Laos, Myanmar's Shan language, and Zhuang, a major language of southern China.

Reference

• Ethnologue report Retrieved 3 August 2005.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai_languages"

Categories: Languages of Southeast Asia | Tai-Kadai languages