Tai Loi, also known as Mong Lue, refers to various
Palaungic languages
The nearly thirty Palaungic or Palaung–Wa languages form a branch of the Austroasiatic languages.
Phonological developments
Most of the Palaungic languages lost the contrastive voicing of the ancestral Austroasiatic consonants, with the disti ...
spoken mainly in Burma, with a few hundred in Laos and some also in China. Hall (2017) reports that ''Tai Loi'' is a cover term meaning 'mountain Tai' in
Shan, and refers to various
Angkuic,
Waic
WAIC (91.9 FM) is the college radio station of American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. It is operated by the Five College Consortium's National Public Radio member station, WFCR, and serves as a relay of the all-news form ...
, and Western Palaungic languages rather than a single language or branch. The Shan exonym ''Tai Loi'' can refer to:
*''Western Palaungic'' branch:
De'ang
*''Lametic'' branch:
Lamet
*''
Angkuic'' branch:
Muak Sa-aak,
Mok
*''
Waic
WAIC (91.9 FM) is the college radio station of American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. It is operated by the Five College Consortium's National Public Radio member station, WFCR, and serves as a relay of the all-news form ...
'' branch
**
Wa:
Meung Yum,
Savaiq, etc.
**
Plang: Phang, Kontoi, Pang Pung, etc.
Additionally, Ethnologue (21st edition), citing Schliesinger (2003), lists Doi as a Tai Loi variety in Ban Muang, Sing District,
Luang Namtha Province, Laos as a nearly extinct language variety spoken by an ethnic group comprising 600 people and 80 households as of 2003. Schliesinger (2003) reports that elderly Doi speakers can understand the
Samtao language.
[Schliesinger, Joachim. 2003. Ethnic Groups of Laos. Vol. 2: Austro-Asiatic-Speaking Peoples. Bangkok: White Lotus Press.] There is considerable variation among the dialects.
The Muak Sa-aak variety of Tai Loi shares 42%
lexical similarity
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
with
U of China; 40% with Pang Pung Plang; and 25% with
standard Wa.
References
*Hall, Elizabeth. 2017
On the Linguistic Affiliation of 'Tai Loi' JSEALS vol. 10.2:xix-xxii.
Palaungic languages
Languages of Yunnan
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