The Bai language (Bai: Bairt‧ngvrt‧zix; Traditional Chinese: 白語; Simplified Chinese: 白语; Mandarin pinyin: Báiyǔ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tonal language with eight tones and a rather rich set of vowels. The vowels of Bai have a unique tense-lax phonemetic opposition which is not common in many other languages. Bai is a spoken language, with no written form, though a system of romanization exists for transliteration.   (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ; literally south of the clouds) is a province of the Peoples Republic of China, located in the far southwestern corner of the country. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture Old City gate Night View of Dali Ancient Walled Downtown The Three Pagodas of Chong Sheng Temple Dali (Chinese: 大理; Pinyin: ; Bai: Darl•lit) is a city in Yunnan province in the south of the Peoples Republic of China, located on a fertile plateau between the... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of sounds and the human voice. ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard sets of printed Chinese characters. ... Simplified Chinese characters (Simplified Chinese: 简体字; Traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: jiÇŽntǐzì; also Simplified Chinese: 简化字; Traditional Chinese: 簡化字; pinyin: jiÇŽnhuàzì) are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. ... Standard Mandarin is the official Chinese spoken language used by the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore. ... Pinyin is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin, where pin means spell and yin means sound. The most common variant of pinyin in use is called Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: HànyÇ” PÄ«nyÄ«n), also known as scheme...   (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ; literally south of the clouds) is a province of the Peoples Republic of China, located in the far southwestern corner of the country. ... Bamileke languages (ISO 639 alpha-3, bai) Bye - k thx bai Baccalaureus in Arte Ingeniaria Band Aid (band) BAI - Soviet early armoured car, predecessor of BA-6 Bai, a Chinese ethnic group Banco Africano de Investimentos, present in List of Angolan companies BAI the official name of ferry company Brittany... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ... It has been suggested that Tonal language be merged into this article or section. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Classification

Traditionally, Bai was said to be a Tibeto-Burman language, though this classification isn't clear and it could be part of an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This language actually borrowed a large portion of its lexicon (about 70%) from Mandarin. Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, in number of speakers worldwide second only to Indo-European. ... Sino-Tibetan languages in red. ... Mandarin, or Beifanghua (Chinese: 北方話; Pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally Northern Dialect(s)), or Guanhua (Traditional Chinese: 官話; Simplified Chinese: 官话; Pinyin: Guānhuà; literally official speech) is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. ...

Thanks to phonetic changes over time, it is possible to identify two distinct periods of borrowing. Once words from these borrowings are accounted for, there are few exclusively Bai words left. This is why some linguists exclude it from classification as a member of Tibeto-Burman.

Bai has a basic syntactic order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), like Chinese. Some remnant "irregular" phrases with SOV could be found in Bai and are thought to be the Tibeto-Burma substratum of ancient Bai. In linguistic typology, subject-verb-object (SVO) is the sequence subject verb object in neutral expressions: Sam ate oranges. ...