Luilang, or ambiguously Ketagalan (Ketangalan, Tangalan; ), was a
Formosan language spoken south of modern-day
Taipei in northern
Taiwan by
one of several peoples that have been called ''Ketagalan''. The language probably went extinct in the mid-20th century and it is very poorly attested.
Location
According to oral tradition, the Luilang people originally inhabited four villages near Taipei: Luili (雷里, Leili), Siulang (秀朗, Xiulang), Bulisiat (務裡薛, Wulixue) and Liau-a (了阿, Liao'a). These merged under the combined name Luilang (雷朗, Leilang), and later migrated to their current location in Outer Oat-a (外挖仔庄, Waiwazizhuang) in the 18th century.
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Name
The name 'Ketagalan' is used by Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
and Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...
for the Luilang language. However, that name is ambiguous, originally referring to all of plains tribes of northern Taiwan. There has been argument in the literature as to whether it is better applied to Luilang, to the south and west of Taipei, or to Basay, to the east. 'Luilang' is an ancestral village name, and so unambiguous for the language southwest of Taipei, whereas 'Basay' is the endonym of the language to the east, and also unambiguous.[Tsuchida, Shigeru. 1985. Kulon: Yet another Austronesian language in Taiwan?. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica 60. 1-59.]
Numerals
The numerals of Luilang are rather divergent. For instance, the Basay language has numerals 5–10 that are cognate with Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, which Luilang does not. Forms recorded by Guérin (using French transcription), Ino (using Japanese transcription) and Ogawa are:[ Li, Jen-kuei and Masayuki Toyoshima (eds). 2006. comparative vocabulary of Formosan languages and dialects, by Naoyoshi Ogawa. Asian and African lexicon series 49. Institute for Languages and cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.]
Notes
References
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Extinct languages of Asia
Languages of Taiwan
Formosan languages
{{Formosan-lang-stub