Hlai Language

Hlai Language

Hlai (Chinese: 黎语) is one of two languages of the Hlai or Li people, the other being the Jiamao "dialect". It is spoken by 600,000 people (not counting Jiamao), a quarter of them monolingual, in the mountains of central and south-central Hainan Island. It forms one of the primary branches of the family of Tai–Kadai languages.

Hlai did not have a writing system until the 1950s, when the Latin script was adopted.

Read more about Hlai Language:  Dialects

Famous quotes containing the word language:

    It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)