Tai Kadai Language Family

Introduction

All members of the Tai-Kadai (also known as Kadai or Kam-Tai) family evolved from an ancestral language called Proto-Tai which Guizhou is thought to have originated in the area between northern Vietnam and southeastern China. Some 2,000 years ago, speakers of the Tai languages moved southward into Southeast Asia. Today, languages belonging to the Tai-Kadai language family are spoken by an estimated 85 million people in Southeast Asia in an area extending from Thailand into Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma, and India. The two national languages of the group, Thai and Lao ( sometimes called Laotian), account for Laos well over half the total of Tai-Kadai speakers. The spelling "Thai" is used for the national language of Thailand and for some regional varieties in that country. "Tai" is used for the wider Tai subfamily of Tai-Kadai and also in the names of some specific varieties.

According to Ethnologue, the Tai-Kadai family includes 76 languages. The distribution of the languages is very complex with much overlapping and interpenetration of the languages. The total number of first-language speakers of Tai-Kadai languages is estimated to be around 85 million people. The largest number of speakers live in Thailand (around 45 million), followed by China with around 15 million. Smaller numbers live in other countries such as Vietnam, Assam, Burma, Laos, France, Europe, UK, U.S., and Canada.

Laos The Tai-Kadai family is usually divided into three major branches, all of which are extraordinarily diverse:

Southwestern
Central
Northern

Some linguists consider the Southwestern and Central branches to be one.

Bouyie Woman

Shan Woman

Only Thai and Lao are official languages of sovereign countries. Some of them, e.g., Gelao and Laha, are official nationalities in Vietnam and China respectively. 54 (70%) of the 76 Tai-Kadai languages are spoken by fewer than 100,000 speakers. Of these, many are on the verge of extinction or are seriously endangered. A few are already extinct. Only 22 of the 76 languages have over 100,000 speakers, and only 9 have over 1 million speakers. Languages with over 100,000 speakers are listed below.

100,000-250,000
Sui	200,000	China
Cao Lan	187,000	Vietnam
Tai Daeng	165,000	Vietnam
Khün	121,000	Myanmar
250,000-500,000
Tai Dón	490,000	Vietnam
Dong Northern	463,000	China
Tai Nüa	357,000	China
500,000-1 million
Nung	856,000	Vietnam
Tai Dam	763,000	Vietnam
Lü	672,000	China
Hlai	667,000	China
Lingao	600,000	China
Phu Tai	519,000	Thailand
1 million and over
Thai	20 million	Thailand
Thai Northeastern	15 million	Thailand
Zhuang Northern	10 million	China
Thai Northern	6 million	Thailand
Zhuang Southern	4 million	China
Shan	3.2 million	Myanmar
Lao	3 million	Laos
Bouyei	2 million	China
Tày	1.5 million	Vietnam

Structure

Sound System

The phonological systems of Tai-Kadai languages share some general features:

All languages are tonal. Tone makes a difference in meaning so that many words in Tai-Kadai languages differ only in tone. The number of tones varies from three to nine.
They all have a large number of vowels and diphthongs.
Some languages, e.g., Thai and Lao, distinguish between short and long vowels.
System of consonants is relatively simple.
Syllables consist of optional consonant(s) + vowel nucleus + optional final consonant(s) which are usually limited to nasals, semivowels, and final stops (p, t, k, and glottal stop).

Grammar

China Girl

There is a great diversity among Tai-Kadai languages in grammatical morphemes, such as particles and various grammatical markers. However, they all share some general features.

They are uninflected, i.e., they do not use endings to show grammatical categories such as tense or number. Such distinctions are assumed from context or are optionally indicated through special words or constructions.
Classifier constructions are used for counting and specifying objects,
Normal word order is Subject-Verb-Object. Modifiers usually follow modified nouns.

Vocabulary

The lexicon of Tai-Kadai languages shows different influences. For more abstract and technical vocabulary the languages spoken in Vietnam and China rely on borrowings from Chinese. Languages to the west had borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali and Khmer.

Most words are monosyllabic, except for loanwords, compounds, and reduplications.

Writing

Tai-Kadai languages in the southern and western areas, with long cultural connections to India, have been using syllabic Brahmi-based writing systems for over seven hundred years. Eight such scripts are currently in use. To the north and east, varieties in contact with Chinese once used modified character-based writing but romanizations have been recently introduced. Many languages in this family have never been written.

Roman script	Hlai
Lao script	Lao
Thai script	Thai

Resources

Click here to find out where Tai-Kadai languages are taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Tai-Kadai languages.

Online resources for the study of Tai-Kadai languages
Ethnologue report on Tai-Kadai language family
Wikipedia article on Tai-Kadai languages

Click on the name of the Tai-Kadai language to learn more about it on this website

Lao
Thai