The Bouyei language (autonym: Haausqyaix also spelled Buyi, Buyei, or Puyi; Chinese: 布依语; pinyin: bùyī yǔ, Vietnamese: tiếng người Bố Y), is a language spoken by the Bouyei ethnic group of southern Guizhou Province in mainland China. Classified as a member of the Northern Tai group in the Tai languages branch of the Tai–Kadai language family, the language has over 2.5 million native speakers and is also used by the Giay people (Vietnamese: Giáy) in some parts of Vietnam. There are native speakers living in France or the United States as well, which immigrated from China or Vietnam. About 98% of the native speakers are in China.
Bouyei's characteristics are similar to the other members of its language branch. It is generally monosyllabic, and word order and particles are the main forms of grammar. Bouyei's syllable initials match up closely to the other Northern Tai languages, with relatively fast simplification and merging. Bouyei sentences can be shown to contain many different levels of phrasing.
The contemporary Bouyei script was developed after the abandonment of the Bouyei-Zhuang Script Alliance Policy in 1981, and was designed from 1981 to 1985. It is focused and phonologically representative, and takes the Wangmo County dialect as its foundation.
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)