| Also Known As: Donga,Dong language
Description:
The Dong language (leec Gaeml) is a Kradai (and Zhuang-Dong) language spoken by the Dong people of China. It has been traditionally written in a variant of Chinese characters. A new spelling 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.
Ethnologue distinguishes two Dong dialects as separate but very closely related "languages" with the codes doc and kmc.
Dong has 32 syllable-initial consonants; seven of them (tʃ-, tʃʰ-, ʃ-, ɻ-, f-, ts- and tsʰ-) only occur in recent loanwords from Chinese.
Dong has 64 syllable finals; 14 of them occur only in Chinese loans and are not listed in the table below.
The phonetic value of the vowel in the finals spelled -ab, -ad and -ag, is [ɐ] in syllables that have the tones -l, -p and -c (see table below); in syllables with tones -s, -t and -x, it is [a]. The phonetic value of the vowel in the finals spelled -eb, -ed and -eg, is [ə] in syllables that have the tones -l, -p and -c; in syllables with tones -s, -t and -x, it is [e].
Dong is a tonal language. Open syllables can occur in one of nine different tones, checked syllables in six tones (so-called entering..... full article at Wikipedia |
