Language
The Dong language (autonym: lix Gaeml) is a Tai–Kadai (Zhuang–Dong) language. Ethnologue distinguishes between two Dong dialects, with the codes kmc for the southern dialect and doc for the northern. Sui, Maonan, and Mulao are the Tai–Kadai languages which are most closely related to Dong.
The Dong people sometimes use Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Dong words. A new orthography based on the Latin alphabet was developed in 1958, but it is not used very much due to a lack of printed material and trained teachers.
Read more about this topic: Dong People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“This is an approach to that universal language which men have sought in vain.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)