Pwo Karen languages

Pwo
Phlou
Ethnicity:	Phlou people
Geographic distribution:	Burma and across the border into Thailand
Linguistic classification:	Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) Karen Pwo
Glottolog:	pwoo1239[1]

The Pwo Karen languages are the second largest group of the Karen languages. The four languages are at best marginally mutually intelligible:

• Eastern Pwo, Western Pwo, Northern Pwo, Phrae Pwo.

The people who speak these languages are referred to by many names, notably "Pwo Karen". The Pwo Karen people have lived in the eastern part of Burma for centuries, and in the western and northern parts of Thailand for at least seven or eight centuries.

The endonym is Phlou [pʰlou̯] or Ka Phlou [ka pʰlou̯], meaning "Karen" or "human beings".

References

1. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Pwo". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

• Dawkins, Erin and Audra Phillips. 2009. A sociolinguistic survey of Pwo Karen in Northern Thailand'. Chiang Mai: Payap University.
• Phillips, Audra. 2009. Lexical Similarity in Pwo Karen. In PYU Working Papers in Linguistics 5, Audra Phillips (ed.). Chiang Mai, Thailand: Payap University Linguistics Department.
• Kato, Atsuhiko. 2009. A basic vocabulary of Htoklibang Pwo Karen with Hpa-an, Kyonbyaw, and Proto-Pwo Karen forms. Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 4:169-218.