Kra languages

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Kra languages

Kra languages, or in Chinese Ge-Yang, are a branch of the Kradai family spoken in southern China

China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
(Yunnan

Yunnan

is a political divisions of China of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country spanning approximately 394,000 square kilometers ....
, Guangxi

Guangxi

This article is about a region of China. For the sociological concept, see Guanxi.Guangxi is a Zhuang people autonomous region of China of the People's Republic of China....
, Hainan

Hainan

Hainan is the smallest Provinces of China of the People's Republic of China. Although the province comprises some two hundred islands scattered among three archipelagos off the southern coast, all but three percent of its land mass is on Hainan Island , from which the province takes its name....
) and in northern Vietnam

Vietnam

Vietnam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam , is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by People's Republic of China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea to the east....
. They have only recently been described in any detail. Several of them have consonant clusters where other Kradai languages have single consonants, and one of them, Buyang

Buyang language

Buyang is a Kradai languages language spoken in Guangnan and Funing Counties, Yunnan Province, China. It is important to the reconstruction of Austro-Tai as, uniquely in Kradai, it retains the disyllabic roots characteristic of Austronesian languages....
, has disyllables for these words. This has been used to support a proposed connection with the Austronesian family

Austronesian languages

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Encyclopedia

Kra languages, or in Chinese Ge-Yang, are a branch of the Kradai family spoken in southern China

China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
(Yunnan

Yunnan

is a political divisions of China of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country spanning approximately 394,000 square kilometers ....
, Guangxi

Guangxi

This article is about a region of China. For the sociological concept, see Guanxi.Guangxi is a Zhuang people autonomous region of China of the People's Republic of China....
, Hainan

Hainan

Vietnam

Buyang language

Austronesian languages

The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia....
. (See Austro-Tai.)

The name Kra comes from the word * "human", which appears as kra, ka, fa, ha in various Kra languages. Benedict (1942) used the compound Ka-Dai for the Kra and Hlai languages taken together, and the term is retained by Ethnologue
Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christianity linguistics service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, primarily to provide the speakers with Bibles, in their native language....
, which includes one of the Hlai languages within Kra.

Classification

Morphological similarities suggest the Kra languages are closest to the Kam–Sui branch

Kam-Sui languages

Kam-Sui languages are a branch of the Kradai languages. Spoken in southern China with small pockets in Laos....
of the family. There are about a dozen Kra languages, depending on what is considered a dialect. The best known is perhaps the Gelao (Klao) dialect cluster, with about 3000 speakers in China out of an ethnic population of half a million.

According to Ostapirat (2002), the internal classification is:

According to Edmondson (2002), Laha is too conservative to be in Western Kra, and he makes it a branch of its own. Ethnologue mistakenly includes the Hlai language

Hlai languages

The Hlai languages are a primary branch of the Kradai languages language family spoken on the island of Hainan. They include Hlai language proper, with 600,000 speakers, its divergent 'dialect' Kamau, with 60,000, and Cun language, which has 80,000 speakers....
Cun of Hainan in Kra; this is not supported by either Ostapirat or Edmondson.

Kra languages

Classification

See also

Further reading