Native to Burma, China, Thailand Glottolog pala1336 | Ethnicity Palaung | |
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Native speakers (ca. 560,000 cited 1982–??) Language family Austroasiatic
Palaungic
Palaung–Riang
Palaung ISO 639-3 Variously:
pll – Shwe
pce – Ruching
rbb – Rumai | ||
Palaung, or in Chinese De'ang, is a Mon–Khmer dialect cluster spoken by over half a million people in Burma (Shan State) and neighboring countries. The Palaung people are divided into Palé, Rumai, and Shwe, and each of these has their own language. The Riang languages are reported to be unintelligible or only understood with great difficulty by native speakers of the other Palaung languages.
Contents
- Yan Zhou 2012
- Ostapirat 2009
- Shintani 2008
- Phonology
- Nouns and noun phrases
- Prepositions and prepositional phrases
- Sentences
- Text sample
- References
A total number of speakers is uncertain; there were 150,000 Shwe speakers in 1982, 272,000 Ruching (Palé) speakers in 2000, and 139,000 Rumai speakers at an unrecorded date.
Yan & Zhou (2012)
Chinese linguists classify "Deang 德昂" varieties (spoken mostly in Santaishan Ethnic Deang Township 三台山德昂族乡, Mang City and Junnong Township 军弄乡, Zhenkang County) as follows (Deangyu Jianzhi). Names in IPA are from Yan & Zhou (2012:154-155)
The Deang 德昂 variously refer themselves as naʔaŋ, daʔaŋ, toʔaŋ, and laʔaŋ, depending on the dialect (Yan & Zhou 2012:154-155). Another Deang autonym is ho (rau) khaoʔ, where rau means 'village'. The local Dai people refer to the Deang as po˧loŋ˧.
Liu (2006) documents 3 Palaungic lects, namely:
Ostapirat (2009)
Weera Ostapirat (2009:74) classifies the Palaung languages as follows. Defining sound changes are given in parentheses.
Shintani (2008)
Shintani (2008) recognizes two dialects of Palaung, namely Southern Palaung and Northern Palaung. Southern Palaung unvoiced stops correspond to Northern Palaung voiced stops, the latter which Shintani (2008) believes to be retentions from Proto-Palaungic. Southern Palaung dialects studied by Shintani (2008) are those of:
Phonology
Shorto (1960) lists the following consonants for Palaung:
According to Shorto (1960), /ə/ does not occur alone in primary stressed syllable, but only in an unstressed syllable or as the second member of a diphthong. There are also a large number of diphthongs, including /eo/, /eə/, /aə/, /ɔə/, /oə/, /uə/, and /iə/.
Although Milne (1921) includes the vowels /ü, ö, ɪ/ in her transcriptions, Shorto (1960) did not find these as vowel phonemes in his work.
(Note that the words cited below in the Syntax section come from Milne (1921), so their phonetic representations may need revision.)
Nouns and noun phrases
The order of elements in the noun phrase is N - (possessor) - (demonstrative)
Consider the following examples:
Prepositions and prepositional phrases
Shwe Palaung has prepositions, as in the following example:
Sentences
Clauses in Shwe are generally in subject–verb–object (SVO) order:
Text sample
The following part of a story in Shwe Palaung is from Milne (1921:146-147)