Shan language

The Shan language is related to the Thai language and is commonly called Tai-Yai, or Tai Long. It is spoken in Northeast Myanmar, that is to say, in the Shan States of Burma, and in pockets in Thailand. There are also Shan people and Shan speakers in the Sipsongpanna region of Yunnan province in China, which lies just across the eastern border from the Shan States of Burma. It has five tones and is a part of the Kam-Tai or Kadai language family, which are found from Northern Myanmar and India on the west through Southern China on the north, and Laos on the east.

The term "Shan" is believed to be a Burmese variation on "Siam," which surely indicates that the ethnic Burmese believed that the "Shan" were a Thai (Tai) people.

Studies of the Shan are complicated by the civil war within Myanmar and the difficulty of escaping to Thailand.

The number of Shan speakers is not known, in part because the Shan population is unknown. Estimates range from 4 million to 30 million, though it is likely that the true number of Shan is somewhere around 6 million, with about half speaking the Shan language; 3.3 million is the number generally estimated. Many Shan speak local dialects as well as the language of their trading partners. Few people can read or write in Shan script, especially foreigners.

Given the chaos prevailing under the current Burmese government, one choice for scholars is to study the Shan people and their language in Thailand, where estimates of Shan refugees run as high as two million, and Mae Hong Son province is home to a Shan majority.

The major source for information about the Shan language in English is Dunwoody Press's Shan for English Speakers. They also publish a Shan-English dictionary. Aside from this, the language is almost completely undescribed in English.

As noted above, Shan is a member of the Tai family of languages (superfamily Kam-tai or Kadai). It has five tones, which do not correspond exactly to Thai tones, plus a "sixth tone" used for emphasis. It is written in what may be called a pseudo-Burmese script, which appears to be Burmese to the casual observer but is in fact entirely different, just as the Shan language has no relation to the Burmese language (a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages).

The Shan tones correspond to Thai tones as follows:

    1. The Shan low tone is equivalent to the Thai low tone.
    2. The Shan high tone is equivalent to the Thai high tone.
    3. The Shan rising tone is close to the Thai rising tone.
    4. The Shan falling tone is close to the Thai falling tone.
    5. The Shan mid-tone is different from the Thai mid-tone. 
        5a.It falls at the end, and therefore most people view Shan as having 
          5a1. a "high falling tone" (4), plus 
          5a2. a "mid-falling tone" (5).

The Shan writing system is much less complex than the Thai writing system, and lacks the notions of high-class, mid-class and low-class consonants, distinctions which help the Thai alphabet to number some 44 consonants. Shan has just 18 consonants, and all tones are clearly indicated with unambiguous tonal markers (in the absence of any marker, the default is the rising tone). The number of consonants in a textbook may vary: there are 18 universally-accepted Shan consonants, and four more which represent sounds not found in Shan, namely 'b,' 'd,' f,' and 'th' as in 'thin.' The last four are quite rare. In addition, most editors include the 'dummy consonant' used to support leading vowels, but some do not. So a given textbook may present 18-23 Shan consonants.

Shan also lacks some of the vowel complexity of Thai, and Shan people learning Thai have difficulties with sounds such as "ia," "ua," and "uea." These all collapse to a single vowel in Shan. Shan also lacks the systematic distinction between long and short vowels characteristic of Thai. While Shan does contain some long and short vowels, most of the Thai long-short differences can only be represented in Shan writing by the corresponding tone shifts.

References

• The Major Languages of East and South-East Asia. Bernard Comrie (London, 1990).

• A Guide to the World's Languages. Merritt Ruhlen (Stanford, 1991).

• Shan for English Speakers. Irving I. Glick & Sao Tern Moeng (Dunwoody Press, Wheaton, 1991).