Everything about Tai-kadai totally explained
» For the Indian cooking utensil, see Kadai.
The
Tai-Kadai languages, also known as
Kadai or
Kradai, are a
tonal language family found in
Southeast Asia and southern
China.
External relations
The Kadai languages were formerly considered to be part of the
Sino-Tibetan family, but are now classified as an independent family. It is sometimes suggested that they're related to the
Austronesian language family, in a family called "Austro-Tai", or even part of a larger
Austric superfamily. However, proposals for the Austric relationship don't conform to the
comparative method.
Roger Blench suggests that,
if the more limited Austro-Tai connection is valid, the relationship is unlikely to be one of two sister families, as has traditionally been proposed. Rather, he suggests that the Kadai languages may be a branch of Austronesian that migrated from the Philippines to
Hainan, and from there spread to mainland China, where the Daic branch of Kadai was "radically restructured" under the influence of the
Hmong-Mien languages and
Chinese.
A recent proposal by Laurent Sagart, which may have some support from human population genetics, is that the proto-Tai-Kadai language was fundamentally an early Austronesian language that may have back-migrated from northeastern Taiwan to the southeastern coast of China thousands of years ago, subsequent to the migration of a pre-Austronesian population or populations from coastal East China to the island of Taiwan and the evolution of the proto-Austronesian language on that island. The apparently cognate forms in Tai-Kadai and Austronesian could then be explained as either commonly inherited vocabulary or prehistoric loanwords from this hypothetical and unknown (but perhaps proto-
Malayo-Polynesian-related) Austronesian language into proto-Tai-Kadai. Sagart also suggests that the Austronesian language family (of which he claims proto-Tai-Kadai is one subgroup) is ultimately related to the
Sino-Tibetan languages and probably has its origin in a Neolithic community of the coastal regions of prehistoric
North China or
East China.
The diversity of the Tai-Kadai languages in southeastern China, especially on
Hainan, suggests that this is close to their homeland. The
Tai branch moved south into
Southeast Asia only in historic times, founding the nations that later became
Thailand and
Laos in what had been
Austroasiatic territory.
Tai-Kadai languages
The classification of Edmondson & Solnit (1997) is as follows. Note however that there's no consensus classification. An alternative is given at
Ethnologue.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Tai-kadai'.
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