Palaung language


Palaung, also known as De'ang, is a Mon–Khmer dialect cluster spoken by over half a million people in Burma and neighboring countries. The Palaung people are divided into Palé, Rumai, and Shwe, and each of whom have their own language. The Riang languages are reported to be unintelligible or only understood with great difficulty by native speakers of the other Palaung languages.
A total number of speakers is uncertain; there were 150,000 Shwe speakers in 1982, 272,000 Ruching speakers in 2000, and 139,000 Rumai speakers at an unrecorded date. Palaung was classified as a "severely endangered" language in UNESCO's 2010 Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.

Dialects

Yan & Zhou (2012)

Chinese linguists classify "De'ang 德昂" varieties as follows. Names in IPA are from Yan & Zhou
The De'ang 德昂 variously refer themselves as ', ', ', and ', depending on the dialect. Another De'ang autonym is ', where ' means 'village'. The local Dai people refer to the De'ang as '.
Liu documents 3 Palaungic lects, namely:
Weera Ostapirat classifies the Palaung languages as follows. Defining sound changes are given in parentheses.
;Palaung
recognizes two dialects of Palaung, namely Southern Palaung and Northern Palaung. Southern Palaung unvoiced stops correspond to Northern Palaung voiced stops, the latter which Shintani believes to be retentions from Proto-Palaungic. Southern Palaung dialects studied by Shintani are those of:
Deepadung, et al. classify the Palaung dialects as follows.
;Palaung
*
Shorto lists the following consonants for Palaung.
LabialsDentalsPalatalsVelarsGlottal
ptt͡ɕkʔ
bdd͡ʑɡ
mnɲŋ
vsh
r,lj

FrontCentralBack
Highiɯu
Mid tenseeo
Mid laxɛəɔ
Lowa

According to Shorto, /ə/ does not occur alone in primary stressed syllable, but only in an unstressed syllable or as the second member of a diphthong. There are also a large number of diphthongs, including /eo/, /eə/, /aə/, /ɔə/, /oə/, /uə/, and /iə/.
Although Milne includes the vowels /ü, ö, ɪ/ in her transcriptions, Shorto did not find these as vowel phonemes in his work.

Syntax

The examples below are form Milne.

Nouns and noun phrases

The order of elements in the noun phrase is N - -.
Consider the following examples:

Prepositions and prepositional phrases

Shwe Palaung has prepositions, as in the following example.

Sentences

Shwe Palaung clauses generally have subject–verb–object word order.

Text sample

The following part of a story in Shwe Palaung is from Milne.