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Andrew Hsiu: Mainland Southeast Asian Languages site

Welcome to Andy Hsiu's "MSEA Languages" website! As this site is a work in progress and is constantly being updated, please check back often for updates.

Language pages

This website contains information for over 70 lesser-known language varieties that I had documented from 2012-2015, mostly in southern China and Vietnam, and also in the Philippines, Laos, and Thailand. Please see the menu on the left for the descriptions of various languages that I had personally documented, most with audio recordings available on Zenodo.org as well. Pages for each language contain audio recordings, locations, demographics, field trip reports, and transcribed word lists. It is my hope that this website will encourage more linguists to upload open-source data and pursue interdisciplinary collaboration.

I have documented languages belonging to all of the five major Southeast Asian language phyla: Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Hmong-Mien, Kra-Dai, and Sino-Tibetan (especially the Mondzish branch).

More of my academic papers and presentations are available on my Academia.edu page. An index of my conference presentations is available here.

As my field research is entirely self-supported, please consider supporting more field research on Southeast Asian languages as we race against time to record the last living speakers of the world's endangered languages.

New endangered languages

So far, I have discovered 12 languages previously unknown to science, all of which are highly endangered. Some may be become extinct within the next 5-10 years, while others have only rememberers and no fluent speakers left. Only Mongphu and the Ku varieties still have speakers under the age of 30. As "relict languages" or "living fossils," many of these languages belong to little-known or previously unidentified distinct evolutionary linguistic lineages, meaning that they are quite different from currently known languages. Hence, further field research on these languages remain extremely urgent. The languages are:

Additionally, the Houzitian and Shajing dialects of Red Gelao have one speaker each, both of whom were in their 80's as of 2012.

I have also documented new dialects of known languages, such as the Na Tay dialect of Laha, the Guanyang dialect(s) of Biao Min, and various Buyi dialects.