Cun ( Chinese: 村話; meaning "village language/speech") or Gelong (仡隆语 / 哥隆语) or Ngan-Fon is a Kra–Dai language spoken on

Hainan Island Hainan (, ; ) is the smallest and southernmost province of the People's Republic of China (PRC), consisting of various islands in the South China Sea. , the largest and most populous island in China,The island of Taiwan, which is slight ...

. It is a part of the

Hlai languages The Hlai languages () are a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family spoken in the mountains of central and south-central Hainan in China by the Hlai people, not to be confused with the colloquial name for the Leizhou branch of Min Chine ...

branch and has a lexical similarity with standard Hlai at 40%. The language has approximately 80,000 speakers, 47,200 of which are monolingual. Cun is a

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

with 10 tones, used depending on whether a syllable is checked or unchecked. The speakers of this language are classified by the Chinese government as ethnic Han (same with speakers of Lingao). The Cun language is considered a dialect of the Han Li language. The Cun were originally Han Chinese people who migrated to Hainan Island and intermingled with the

Li people The Hlai, also known as Li or Lizu, are a Kra–Dai-speaking ethnic group, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The vast majority live off the southern coast of China on Hainan Island, where the ...

References

*http://www.language-archives.org/language/cuq Languages of China Hlai languages {{tk-lang-stub