Cuối language
Austroasiatic language spoken in Southeast Asia
Cuối, also known as Thổ, is a dialect cluster spoken by around 70,000 people in Vietnam. It is also spoken by a couple thousand people in Laos—mainly in the provinces of Bolikhamsai and Khammouane.
Phonology
Làng Lỡ dialect
Consonants
The consonant inventory of the Làng Lỡ dialect, as cited by Michel Ferlus:
[ʈ] is found in Vietnamese loanwords with initial /ʈ/ (orthographic ⟨tr⟩)
[β ð ɣ ˀð] originate in the borrowing of segments from a variety of Vietnamese that existed several centuries ago.
Vowels
Tones
There are eight tones in the Làng Lỡ. Tones 1 to 6 are found on sonorant-final syllables (a.k.a. 'live' syllables): syllables ending in a vowel, semi-vowel or nasal. Tones 7 and 8 are found on obstruent-final syllables (a.k.a. 'stopped' syllables), ending in -p -t -c -k. This is a system comparable to that of Vietnamese.
Vocabulary
The data is from Cuoi Cham vocabulary recordings and the Mon-Khmer Etymological Dictionary.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cuối language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.