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Language Lineage

Kam-Sui

Kam (Dong), Sui, Maonan and Mulam, languages of the southern Chinese uplands. The Kam are known for polyphonic choral singing, the Sui for a traditional ritual script.

c. 1st millennium BCE – presentGuizhou, Guangxi and Hunan in southern China
On this page
  1. Songs and a Ritual Script
  2. Many Tones, Many Consonants
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Songs and a Ritual Script

The Kam-Sui languages are spoken in the valleys where Guizhou, Guangxi and Hunan meet. The Kam (Dong) people, about three million strong, are famous for their 'grand songs', polyphonic choral music without instruments, which UNESCO recognised as intangible heritage in 2009. The Sui preserve a traditional script, Shuishu, used by ritual specialists for divination and calendars, with characters partly borrowed from Chinese and partly their own.

02

Many Tones, Many Consonants

The Kam-Sui languages are known among linguists for the size of their sound systems. Southern Kam is often cited as having one of the largest tone inventories on record: counting the tones of syllables ending in a stop separately, descriptions of the Zhanglu dialect give fifteen, all descended from the same four Proto-Tai-type categories as the five tones of Thai.

Sui is remarkable for its consonants. Besides ordinary stops and nasals it has prenasalised stops (ⁿd in ⁿda 'eye'), preglottalised stops (ʔb, ʔd), voiceless nasals (m̥ in m̥a 'dog') and uvular consonants, so that some descriptions count around seventy possible initial consonants. Many of these contrasts preserve distinctions that Tai has merged, which makes Kam-Sui important for reconstructing the ancestor.

Grammatically the branch follows the family pattern: short words, no inflection, classifiers, and modifiers after the noun. Today most Kam and Sui children still learn the language at home in rural areas, but schooling and migration for work have brought Mandarin into daily life, and the smaller Kam-Sui languages are spoken mainly by older people.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Chinac. 2 million

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 1st millennium BCEContested

    The upland valleys

    Kam-Sui separates from the other Kra-Dai branches in the uplands of southern China. The date is uncertain.

    Sources (1)
    • Diller, Anthony V. N., Jerold A. Edmondson & Yongxian Luo, eds. 2008. The Tai-Kadai Languages. London: Routledge.
  2. WritingUndated; attested in manuscripts of recent centuriesContested

    The Sui script

    Sui ritual specialists keep manuscripts in Shuishu, a script of several hundred characters, some borrowed from Chinese, some reversed or invented. Its age is unknown and disputed.

    Sources (1)
    • Diller, Anthony V. N., Jerold A. Edmondson & Yongxian Luo, eds. 2008. The Tai-Kadai Languages. London: Routledge.
  3. Revitalization1958 – 2009

    Writing Kam and recognising its songs

    A Latin alphabet is created for Kam in 1958, and in 2009 UNESCO inscribes the Kam 'grand song' on its list of intangible cultural heritage, supporting its transmission.

    Sources (1)
    • UNESCO. 2009. Grand song of the Dong ethnic group. Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Paris: UNESCO.