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:
“...I ... believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have somethinga great dealto do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words, by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between ones real and ones declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
—George Orwell (19031950)
“These are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.”
—Thomas Jefferson (17431826)