The Cai–Long () or Ta–Li languages are a group of
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
spoken in western
Guizhou
Guizhou (; formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked province in the southwest region of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the province. Guizhou borders the autonomous region of Guangxi to t ...
,
China. Only
Caijia is still spoken, while
Longjia and
Luren are extinct.
[Hölzl, Andreas. 2021]
Longjia (China) - Language Contexts
''Language Documentation and Description'' 20, 13-34. The branch was first recognized by Chinese researchers in the 1980s, with the term ''Cai–Long'' () first mentioned in Guizhou (1982: 43).
[GMSWSB 1982 = Guizhousheng minzu shiwu weiyuanhui shibie bangongshi 贵州省民族事务委员会识别办公室. Guizhou minzu shibie ziliaoji 贵州民族识别资料集, vol. 8, longjia, caijia 龙家，蔡家. Guiyang. (Unpublished manuscript.)]
The languages are unclassified within Sino-Tibetan, and could be
Sinitic or
Tibeto-Burman
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non- Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people spe ...
.
Languages
The Cai–Long languages are:
*
Caijia
*
Longjia (extinct)
*
Luren (extinct)
Lexical innovations
Hölzl (2021) proposes the name ''Ta–Li'' as a portmanteau of the two lexical innovations ‘two’ and ‘pig’, respectively.
See also
*
List of unrecognized ethnic groups of Guizhou
*
Greater Bai comparative vocabulary list (Wiktionary)
References
{{Sino-Tibetan languages