Kam/Dong language

[j_wilkes]

Dear all,

I am planning a trip to eastern Guizhou province, and I'd be grateful for any information anyone can give about the Kam people (also known as Dong) and their language. Specifically:

Does anyone know of any learning resources for Kam? I can't speak Mandarin (so can't use eg. a Kam/Chinese dictionary).

What proportion of the population in the area east of Kaili (eg. the villages of Liping, Rongjiang, Zhaoxing) are able to speak Putonghua?

What is the likelyhood of being able to find a Kam to Mandarin translator?

What are the chances of finding a translator who can speak Kam and English?

My purpose in travelling here is to record traditional oral poems and songs in Kam. If anyone has visited this area recently, I'd be very happy to hear from you. (I hope this post is not too off-topic for the site.)

Many thanks. Yours,

Jamie Wilkes

[Ferno]

i don't really know anything but Ethnologue has some info...

Dong, Northern:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=doc

Dong, Southern:

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=kmc

[j_wilkes]

Thanks, interesting links. I've read the Norman Geary book & found it helpful, but this has given me some more leads to follow up.

[hakkaboy]

Well, I visited Sanjiang once. All the villagers spoke Dong, but could not write it. Apparently there is a script invented by the government, but they popularised it in three villages only, but I don't know which three.

[j_wilkes]

Apparently there is now a scheme in Zaidang village, Guizhou, where Kam children are taught bilingually. If you're interested, and can download pdf files, here's a link to an article, by Geary & Pam, in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development:

http://www.multilingual-matters.net/jmmd/024/0274/jmmd0240274.pdf

The children are taught to read and write in Kam.

[Ferno]

Well, I visited Sanjiang once. All the villagers spoke Dong, but could not write it. Apparently there is a script invented by the government, but they popularised it in three villages only, but I don't know which three.

since when do dialects get their own script??

[Quest]

since when do dialects get their own script??

I dont know what the "Dong" language is exactly, but it should be a minority language, and not a dialect of Chinese.

[j_wilkes]

Yes, it's a minority language. I'm far from an expert on the matter, but as far as I've been able to discover, attempts to introduce a script began in the late 1950s. It's a Roman script, and uses the same conventions as pinyin where the sounds are the same as standard Chinese (I found this info in the article I linked in my previous post).

[Ah-Bin]

I thought I saw a dictionary of Dong to Chinese once, but the romanisation was only like pinyin to a point. The tones were written with letters put after each syllable, like Zhuang.

naz, naj, naq, na, are all pornounced "na" but with different tones.

If you can read Chinese, or have a friend who does, you can check out this website

http://www.kam-tai.org/languages/languagesdangan/dongyu.htm

I'll just go and have a look at the pages and find one with the tones for you...

[Ah-Bin]

http://www.kam-tai.org/languages/dong/teaching/dyjz/dyjz02.htm

The first vertical line of numbers on the left-hand side shows the tones for Rongjiang. Dong has fifteen tones! I'm glad I'm not learning it....

The numbers are the pitches of the tones, five being the highest pitch and one the lowest.

The numbers for the Mandarin tones are 55, 25, 213, and 51 (I think!) get a Mandarin speaker to say the four tones for you so you can see how tones are mapped with numbers.