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:
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, & what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, & what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way;Mall this comes of Authorship.”
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)