Jiamao (Chinese: 加茂; pinyin: Jiāmào; also 台Tái or 塞Sāi) is a divergent Kra-Dai language or possible language isolate[2] spoken in southern Hainan, China.[3] Jiamao speakers' autonym is tʰai1.[4][5]
Jiamao is often classified one of the Hlai languages, which constitute a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family, but Norquest (2007, 2015) and others note that Jiamao has a non-Hlai substratum.
Graham Thurgood (1992) suggested that Jiamao might have an Austroasiaticsubstratum. Norquest (2007) identified various lexical items in Jiamao that do not reconstruct to Proto-Hlai and later firmly established it as a non-Hlai language.[6] Hsiu (2018) notes that Jiamao also contains various words borrowed from an unknown, currently extinct Tibeto-Burman branch.[7]
In the 1980s, Jiamao was spoken by 50,000 people in central and south-central Hainan, mostly in Jiamao Township (加茂镇) in Baoting Li and Miao Autonomous County. It shares less than half of its lexicon with the Hlai languages.[8]
In Lingshui Li Autonomous County, Jiamao is spoken in Benhao (本号), Nanping (南平), Wenluo (文罗), Zuguan (祖关), Longguang (隆广), and Tianzi (田仔).[9] In Lingshui County, Jiamao is known as Tái (台), and is also known as Sāi (塞) or Jiāwǒ (加我).[citation needed]
There are four Jiamao dialects,[10] namely Jiamao (加茂), Liugong (六弓), Tianzi (田仔), and Qunying (群英).
Jiamao is spoken in the following villages and townships of southern Hainan.[citation needed]
Jiamao has 8 distinct tone categories (Norquest 2015:311):
Tone category
High register tone
Low register tone
A (open)
/55/ (tone 1)
/11/ (tone 4)
X (glottalized)
/51/ (tone 5)
/31/ (tone 2)
DL (long closed)
/53/ (tone 9)
/31/ (tone 8)
DS (short closed)
/55/ (tone 7)
/22/ (tone 10)
Like Proto-Be,[12] Jiamao does not distinguish between tone categories B and C, but rather only has an X category.
As noted by Thurgood (1992) and Norquest (2015), these do not correspond to Hlai tones, but rather initials in Proto-Hlai. High register tones are derived from unvoiced initials, and low register tones from voiced initials.
^Xin, Shibiao 辛世彪 (2009-02-14). "Jiāmào Líyǔ de sìdà fāngyán" 加茂黎语的四大方言 [The Four Dialects of Jiamao]. Xīnlàng bókè (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. Retrieved 2017-12-30.
^Yang, Yiqi 杨遗旗 (2014). "Líyǔ héxīn rénchēng dàicí yánjiū" 黎语核心人称代词研究 [A Study of Core Personal Pronouns in Li Language]. Hǎinán shīfàn dàxué xuébào (Shèhuì kēxué bǎn) 海南师范大学学报 (社会科学版) (in Chinese). 27 (7): 118–123. doi:10.16061/j.cnki.cn46-1076/c.2014.07.051.
^Chen, Yen-ling (2018). Proto-Ong-Be(PDF) (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Hawaii at Manoa. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2023-06-05. Retrieved 2023-04-27.
Thurgood, Graham (1992). "The Aberrancy of the Jiamao Dialect of Hlai: Speculation on its Origins and History". In Ratliff, Martha S.; Schiller, E. (eds.). Papers from the First Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies. pp. 417–433.
Norquest, Peter Kristian (2007). A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai (PhD dissertation thesis). University of Arizona. hdl:10150/194203.