Austroasiatic language spoken in Southeast Asia
Cuối, known as Thổ,[2] is a dialect cluster spoken by around 70,000 Thổ people in Vietnam and a couple thousand in Laos, mainly in the provinces of Bolikhamsai and Khammouane.
Phonology
Làng Lỡ dialect
Consonants
The consonant inventory of the Làng Lỡ dialect, as cited by Michel Ferlus:[3]
- [ʈ] is found in Vietnamese loanwords with initial /ʈ/ (orthographic ⟨tr⟩)
- [β ð ɣ ˀð] originate in the borrowing of segments from a variety of Vietnamese that existed several centuries ago.
Vowels
Tones
There're eight tones in the Làng Lỡ. Tones 1 to 6 are found on sonorant-final syllables (a.k.a. 'live' syllables): syllables ending in a vowel, semi-vowel or nasal. Tones 7 and 8 are found on obstruent-final syllables (a.k.a. 'stopped' syllables), ending in -p -t -c -k.[3] This is a system comparable to that of Vietnamese.
Vocabulary
The data is from Cuoi Cham vocabulary recordings and the Mon-Khmer Etymological Dictionary.
References
- ^ Tho at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
Hung at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required) - ^ "The Vietic Branch". sealang.net.
- ^ a b Ferlus 2015, I.2
Further reading
- Ferlus, Michel (2015). Hypercorrections in the Thổ dialect of Làng Lỡ (Nghệ An, Vietnam): an example of pitfalls for comparative linguistics (Ph.D.).
- Nguyen, Huu Hoanh and Nguyen Van Loi (2019). Tones in the Cuoi Language of Tan Ki District in Nghe An Province, Vietnam. The Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 12.1:lvii-lxvi.
