Red Gelao
[aka Voa Dê, Vandu Gelao, 紅仡佬]Classification: Tai-Kadai
·critically endangered
Classification: Tai-Kadai
·critically endangered
Caijia is an endangered language which is very close to Red Gelao both in geographical location and in grammatical features. With only around 500 adept speakers nowadays, Caijia has become a severely endangered language. However, unlike other ethnic languages, it was hardly recognized by linguists even today. Caijia is a special language spoken by the Caijia people living in Guizhou, where they are surrounded by other ethnic groups like Gelao, Hmong and Yi. As a result, Caijia is inevitably influenced by its language environment and shares some common grammatical features with its surrounding languages, especially Red Gelao and Yi. The population of the speakers has been declining at a rapid rate in recent years, so this unknown language will soon become extinct if we still take few actions. It will be so disappointing to see this language die out in front of us quietly, without even being recognized by the world. And it will be very soon, maybe in just a few years. We are eager to show people all around the world this beautiful but ignored language along with the Caijia people in Southeast China. This summer, we have recorded and made numerous audios, videos and photos about Caijia for viewers to acknowledge a quantity of information. Because of its scarce and late-starting research projects in progress, the affiliations of Caijia remain unidentified and controversial. Some propose that Caijia is related to Bai, while it is also very close in many features of its features to Sinitic Languages. Caijia is a language of SVO order, but the order in constituents in NP shows a certain degree of turbulence. Demonstrative, adjective and relative precede the head noun, while numeral and classifier follow the head noun.
27.183286, 104.29448 |
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Jan. 1, 2023 |
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