Bai (language)
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| Bai Bairt‧ngvrt‧zix, 白语 Báiyǔ |
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| Spoken in: | Yunnan, China | |
| Total speakers: | 1 240 000 (2003) | |
| Language family: | — Bai |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sit (B) | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | variously: bca — Central Bai, Jianchuan dialect bfs — Southern Bai, Dali dialect bfc — Northern Bai, Bijiang dialect |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The Bai language (Bai: Bairt‧ngvrt‧zix; Traditional Chinese: 白語, Simplified Chinese: 白语; Mandarin pinyin: Báiyǔ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tonal language with a rather rich set of vowels. Bai is a spoken language, with no written form, though a system of romanization exists for transliteration.
[edit] Classification
Traditionally, Bai was said to be a Tibeto-Burman language, though this classification isn't clear and it could be part of an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This language actually borrowed a large portion of its lexicon (about 70%) from Mandarin.
Thanks to phonetic changes over time, it is possible to identify two distinct periods of borrowing. Once words from these borrowings are accounted for, there are few exclusively Bai words left. This is why some linguists exclude it from classification as a member of Tibeto-Burman.
Bai has a basic syntactic order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), like Chinese.
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