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Language Lineage

Kra

Gelao, Lachi, Laha, Buyang and their relatives, small and scattered languages that gave the family the first half of its name. Kra is their word for 'person'.

c. 2nd millennium BCE – presentScattered villages in Guizhou, Yunnan and Guangxi (China) and northern Vietnam
On this page
  1. Scattered Survivors
  2. Longer Words and Late Discovery
  3. Where it's spoken
  4. Turning points

01

Scattered Survivors

The Kra languages survive in small, isolated communities spread across southwest China and northern Vietnam, surrounded by Chinese, Hmong and Tai speakers. Gelao is spoken by only a few thousand of the more than half a million people officially counted as Gelao; most have shifted to Chinese. Several Kra varieties have only elderly speakers. They are important for reconstruction precisely because they are so different from the better-known Tai languages.

02

Longer Words and Late Discovery

The Kra languages were among the last members of the family to be documented. Gelao, Lachi and Laha were known in outline by the mid-20th century, but Buyang and Paha in southeastern Yunnan were first described in detail by Chinese linguists, above all Li Jinfang, only in the 1990s. Weera Ostapirat's reconstruction of Proto-Kra in 2000 drew on this new material.

Their value lies in what they kept. Where Tai and Kam-Sui words are single syllables, Kra languages often keep a first syllable or prefix: Buyang says ma⁰ ta for 'eye' and ma⁰ nuk for 'bird', and many nouns carry a prefix such as qa⁰, as in qa⁰ tu 'louse'. These longer shapes resemble Austronesian words and help to reconstruct the ancestor of the whole family. Kra languages also often use native words where Tai uses Chinese loans. Grammatically they share the family's broad pattern, with tones, subject–verb–object order and classifiers, although Gelao has been heavily reshaped by Chinese. Because speakers are few, scattered and nearly all bilingual in Chinese or Vietnamese, some of this evidence is being lost within a generation.

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. Chinac. 11,000
  2. Vietnamc. 10,000

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. 2nd millennium BCEContested

    Into the uplands

    The ancestors of the Kra languages separate from the rest of Kra-Dai and settle in the uplands of the southwest. Their present scattered distribution suggests later fragmentation.

    Sources (1)
    • Diller, Anthony V. N., Jerold A. Edmondson & Yongxian Luo, eds. 2008. The Tai-Kadai Languages. London: Routledge.
  2. Extinction20th centuryContested

    Shift to Chinese

    Most Gelao communities shift to Southwestern Mandarin, and several Kra varieties fall silent or survive only among elders. The dates for individual varieties are poorly recorded.

    Sources (1)
    • Moseley, Christopher, ed. 2010. Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, 3rd ed. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.