Jiamao language

Jiamao
Kamau
Native to	People's Republic of China
Region	Hainan
Native speakers	unknown (52,000 cited 1987)[1]
Language family	Tai–Kadai Hlai Jiamao
Language codes
ISO 639-3	jio
Glottolog	jiam1236[2]

Jiamao (加茂, or Kamau) is a divergent Hlai language spoken in southern Hainan, China.

Classification

Jiamao has many divergent words, and this lexical aberrancy is still a matter of debate. Graham Thurgood (1992) suggests that it might have an Austroasiatic substratum. Norquest (2007) identifies various lexical items in Jiamao that do not reconstruct to Proto-Hlai.

Demographics

In the 1980s, Jiamao was spoken by 50,000 people in central and south-central Hainan Island, mostly in Jiamao Township (加茂镇), Baoting County (保亭县). It shares less than half of its lexicon with standard Hlai.^[3]

There are four Jiamao dialects.^[4][5]

References

1. Jiamao at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Jiamao". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Norquest, Peter K. 2007. A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai. Ph.D. Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona.
4. http://lizu.baike.com/article-1004623.html
5. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_49d8b2980100c9nf.html

• Norquest, Peter K. 2007. A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai. Ph.D. dissertation. Tucson: Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona.
• Thurgood, Graham. 1992. The aberrancy of the Jiamao dialect of Hlai: speculation on its origins and history. In Ratliff, Martha S. and Schiller, E. (eds.), Papers from the First Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 417-433. Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies.