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 is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)