Jiamao language

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

• 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.

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