Daai language

Dai
Region	Burma
Ethnicity	Dai Chin
Native speakers	37,000 (2010)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) Kuki-Chin Southern Dai; ; ; ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	dao
Glottolog	daai1236[2]

Daai (Daai Chin), which borders the Mün and Ütbü language groups, is a Kuki-Chin language of Burma. It is spoken in 142 villages in Kanpetlet, Matupi, Mindat, and Paletwa townships in Chin State, Burma (Ethnologue).

Dialects

Ethnologue lists the following dialects of Dai Chin.

Daai has twenty-four consonant phonemes.

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasals	m̥ m	n̥ n		ŋ̊ ŋ
Plosives	p pʰ b	t tʰ d		k kʰ	ʔ
Fricatives		s sʰ		x ɣ	h
Lateral Fricatives		ɬ
Approximants	w	l	j

Daai has seven vowel phonemes, each with a phonemic length contrast.

Daai is an isolating or analytic language. There is no inflectional morphology at the word level; case, number, and tense are marked by clitics.

Daai	English
mthan	night
mpyong	mouth
kpyak	to destroy
pha	to arrive
Nghngaai-ktheih hmin lokti.	The mango fruits became ripe.
Mat jah mata i:ma am ngleh-ei ni.	They did not visit each other's houses.

Dai at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Daai Chin". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

Naing Kheng. 2017. A phonological description of the Mkuui variety of Dai Chin. Master’s Thesis.
Helga So-Hartmann. 2009. A Descriptive Grammar of Daai Chin. The Regents University of California.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.