- Palaungic languages
The nearly thirty Palaungic or Palaung-Wa languages form a branch of the
Austro-Asiatic languages .Most of the Palaungic languages lost the contrastive voicing of the ancestral Austro-Asiatic consonants, with the distinction often shifting to the following vowel. In the Wa branch, this is generally realized as
breathy voice vowelphonation ; inPalaung -Riang, as a two-way register tone system. The Angkuic languages have contour tone — theU language , for example, has four tones, "high, low, rising, falling," — but these developed from vowel length and the nature of final consonants, not from the voicing of initial consonants.Classification
The Palaungic family includes at least three branches, with the position of some languages as yet unclear. Lamet, for example, is sometimes classified as a separate branch.
*Palaung-Riang: Shwe (Gold Palaung, De'ang), Pale (Silver Palaung), Rumai, Riang, Yinchia, ? Lamet, Con
* ? Danau (perhaps in Palaung-Riang)
*Angkuic: Angku, Hu, Mok, Samtao, U (Pouma)
*Waic: Blang, La, Lawa, Paraok (Wa proper), Phalok (Khalo)Further reading
*Milne, L. (1931). "A dictionary of English-Palaung and Palaung-English". Rangoon: Supdt., Govt. Print. and Stationery.
*Milne, L. (1921). "An elementary Palaung grammar". Oxford: The Clarendon press.External links
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90165 Palaungic languages page] from Ethnologue
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