01
The Other Language of Hainan
Be is spoken by about 600,000 people along the north coast of Hainan, in Lingao and Chengmai counties, the western part of Haikou and neighbouring parts of Danzhou. Chinese linguists call it Lingao, after the county where it is strongest; the name Be comes from the word lists of the French missionary François-Marie Savina, made in the early 20th century. Its speakers are officially classified as Han Chinese, not as a minority, so no census counts them. There are two main dialect groups, western (Lincheng) and eastern (Qiongshan), which are not easily understood by each other's speakers.
Be is not related closely to Hlai, the other Kra-Dai branch on Hainan. Hlai speakers have been on the island much longer and are concentrated in the mountainous interior, while Be is much closer to the Tai languages of the mainland. That points to two separate crossings. Liang Min and Zhang Junru, whose monograph of 1997 is the fullest description, suggest that the ancestors of the Be crossed from the Leizhou Peninsula of Guangdong about 2,500 years ago, in the Warring States period. The date rests on historical inference rather than direct evidence, and others would place the crossing later or look for Be's origins further west in Guangxi.
02
Living Beside Hainanese
For most of the last thousand years Be has shared northern Hainan with Hainanese, a Min Chinese language brought by settlers mainly from Fujian and Guangdong. Nearly all Be speakers also speak Hainanese or Mandarin, and Be has absorbed Chinese words in several layers, each with its own pronunciation: older borrowings adapted to Be's sound system, and later ones taken from local Hainanese or from standard Chinese. Some scholars think the influence ran the other way as well, and that the implosive consonants ɓ and ɗ of Hainanese, unusual for a Chinese language, were brought in by Be or Hlai speakers who shifted to Chinese.
Be was documented late. Savina's vocabulary was published only in 1965, edited by André-Georges Haudricourt; Mantaro Hashimoto published a classified lexicon of the Lingao dialect in 1980; and Liang and Zhang's survey compared many local varieties. Mark Hansell used this material in 1988 to show that Be's tones and initial consonants line up with Tai's in regular patterns. Be has no standard written form. It remains the everyday language of many villages and market towns, but schooling and media are in Mandarin, and its use among young people in Haikou is declining.
Where it’s spoken
- China
Turning points
- SplitContested
Across to northern Hainan
The ancestors of the Be cross from the mainland, probably the Leizhou Peninsula, to the north coast of Hainan and separate from the Tai-speaking mainland. The date and point of departure are disputed.
Sources (1)
- Contact
Hainanese settlement
Min-speaking settlers from Fujian and Guangdong arrive in growing numbers on northern Hainan, especially from the Song dynasty on. Be speakers become bilingual in Hainanese, and Be takes in successive layers of Chinese vocabulary.
Sources (2)
Contested classifications
- Widely accepted
Be-Tai
Evidence for
Hansell (1988) showed regular correspondences between Be and Tai tones and initial consonants and a body of shared basic vocabulary not found in Kam-Sui. Edmondson and Solnit, Norquest and the Glottolog classification follow him, and Chinese scholars likewise put Lingao close to Zhuang and Tai.
Evidence against
Be's place is still not settled in detail. Ostapirat does not use Kam-Tai as a subgroup at all, and small mainland languages such as Jizhao, which shares some vocabulary with Be, are still poorly described. Long contact between Be and Tai speakers before the crossing to Hainan, and heavy borrowing from Chinese by both, could explain some of the shared words.
Sources (2)