ISO 639-3 jio | Native speakers (52,000 cited 1987) Glottolog jiam1236 | |
Language family Tai–KadaiHlaiJiamao | ||
Classification
Jiamao has many divergent words, and this lexical aberrancy is still a matter of debate. Graham Thurgood (1992) suggests that it might have an Austroasiatic substratum. Norquest (2007) identifies various lexical items in Jiamao that do not reconstruct to Proto-Hlai.
Demographics
In the 1980s, Jiamao was spoken by 50,000 people in central and south-central Hainan Island, mostly in Jiamao Township (加茂镇), Baoting County (保亭县). It shares less than half of its lexicon with standard Hlai.
There are four Jiamao dialects.
References
Jiamao language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA