The Luish, Asakian, or Sak 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. ...

belonging to the Sal branch. They are spoken in Burma and Bangladesh, and consist of the Sak,

Kadu KADU (90.1 FM broadcasting, FM) is a radio station licensed to Hibbing, Minnesota, United States. The station is owned by Heartland Christian Broadcasters, Inc. Translators In addition to the main station, KADU is relayed by an additional trans ...

, and Ganan languages. In recent years, Luish languages have been influenced by

Burmese Burmese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia * Burmese people * Burmese language * Burmese alphabet * Burmese cuisine * Burmese culture Animals * Burmese cat * Burmese chicken * Burmese (hor ...

and

Chakma Chakma may refer to: *Chakma people, a Tibeto-Burman people of Bangladesh and Northeast India *Chakma language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them **Chakma script ***Chakma (Unicode block) Chakma is a Unicode block containing characters for ...

. Although Luish languages are now widely scattered and spoken by relatively small populations, Luce (1985) suggests that the Luish languages were “once spread over the whole north of Burma, from

Manipur Manipur () ( mni, Kangleipak) is a state in Northeast India, with the city of Imphal as its capital. It is bounded by the Indian states of Nagaland to the north, Mizoram to the south and Assam to the west. It also borders two regions of Myanm ...

perhaps to northern

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked Provinces of China, province in Southwest China, the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is ...

.” Matisoff (2013) proposes the name ''Asakian'', since ''Lui'' or ''

Loi Loi is the word in the Meitei language (Meiteilon) for the term "scheduled caste". The term ''Loi'' is given to the indigenous and aboriginal people of Manipur in northeast India who refused to adopt Hinduism or were semi-Hinduised when the new ...

'' were used by the Meithei to refer to slaves. Although many speakers of Luish languages refer to themselves as ''Sak'', ''Cak'', or similar variations, speakers of Ganan and Mokhwang Kadu do not refer to themselves as ''Sak'' or ''Asak''.

Extinct languages

Matisoff (2013) has demonstrated that the extinct Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel languages of

are also Luish languages. Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel are extinct and known only from a glossary recorded in 1859, their speakers having switched to Meitei. There are also various unattested varieties of ''Lui'' or ''Loi'' ('serf') mentioned in nineteenth-century accounts that appear to be Luish varieties. It is uncertain whether the extinct Pyu language of central Myanmar is a Luish language. Benedict (1972) and Shafer (1974) had classified the extinct Taman language of northern Myanmar as part of the Luish branch, but it has since been shown by Keisuke Huziwara (2016) to be a non-Luish language, possibly a separate branch of Tibeto-Burman.

Classification

Matisoff (2013), citing Huziwara (2012), provides the following Stammbaum classification for the Asakian (Luish) branch. ;Asakian * Cak **Cak **Sak * Chairel *

(Chakpa) ** Sengmai ** Andro *Kadu ** Ganan **

Huziwara (2020) merges Sengmai, Andro, and Chairel as varieties of Chakpa.

Reconstruction

Proto-Luish has been reconstructed by Huziwara (2012), with additional Proto-Luish lexical reconstructions by Matisoff (2013). Like Proto-Austroasiatic and Jingpho, Proto-Luish has a

sesquisyllabic Primarily in Austroasiatic languages (also known as Mon–Khmer), in a typical word a minor syllable is a reduced (minor) syllable followed by a full tonic or stressed syllable. The minor syllable may be of the form or , with a reduced vowel, as ...

syllable structure. Proto-Luish reconstructions by Huziwara (2012), can be found at Wiktionary's list of Proto-Luish reconstructions.

References

*Benedict, Paul K. (1972). ''Sino-Tibetan: a conspectus''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. *Huziwara, Keisuke. 2016
タマン語の系統再考 / On the genetic position of Taman reconsidered
In ''Kyoto University Linguistic Research '' 35, p. 1-34. *Luce, George H. (1985). ''Phases of Pre-Pagan Burma: languages and history, vol. I, II''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Shafer, Robert (1974). ''Introduction to Sino-Tibetan''. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowit

Bibliography

* George van Driem (2001). ''Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region.'' Brill. {{DEFAULTSORT:Luish languages Sal languages Languages of India Languages of Myanmar