Lakkia speakers are thought to have migrated from further east, possibly from the Biao-speaking areas of Northwestern Guangdong Province (L.-Thongkum 1992). Today, they live mostly in the Dayaoshan (Chinese: 大瑶山; lit. 'Big Yao Mountain') region of Jinxiu County.
Lakkia people are also known as the Cháshān Yáo 茶山瑶, meaning "Tea Mountain Yao", since they were traditionally considered by neighboring peoples to be ethnic Yao people. The name Lakkia is an autonym (self-designated name) that means "mountain people". All Lakkia dialects have 5 tones.
There is currently no consensus on the classification of Lakkia within the Kra–Dai family. Solnit (1988) and Hansell (1988) classify Lakkia as a sister of the Kam–Sui branch. Additionally, Solnit (1988) classifies Biao and Lakkia together as part of a Biao–Lakkia branch that is coordinate to Kam-Sui. However, L.-Thongkum (1992) considers Lakkia to be most closely related to the Tai branch, based on the large number of shared lexical items.
Norquest (2021) proposes a Biao–Lakkja branch as the first branch to split off from Kra-Dai.[2]
The Lingzu dialect still preserves /kl-/ initial clusters, which corresponds to /kj-/ in most other dialects (L.-Thongkum 1992). Additionally, Changdong 长洞 and Jintian 金田 tone /˥˩/ (51) corresponds to Jinxiu 金秀 tone /˨˧˩/ (231). Also, L.-Thongkum (1992) reports that Jintian 金田 is a less conservative dialect.
Classification of Lakkia dialects by Norquest (2021):[2]
Lakkia is notable for preserving many prefixes that have been lost in most other Kra-Dai languages, including prefixes (such as *k.-) in archaic Chinese loanwords that are crucial for the reconstruction of Old Chinese.[4]
^ abcNorquest, Peter (2021). "Classification of (Tai-)Kadai/Kra-Dai languages". The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 225–246. doi:10.1515/9783110558142-013.
^Guangxi Minority Languages Orthography Committee. 2008. Vocabularies of Guangxi ethnic languages [广西民族语言方音词汇]. Beijing: Nationalities Publishing House [民族出版社].
^Baxter, William H. and Laurent Sagart. 2014. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-994537-5.
Fan, Wenjia (2019). A Grammar of Lakkja, South China (Ph.D. thesis). The University of Melbourne. hdl:11343/233407.
Hansell, Mark. 1988. The Relation of Be to Tai: Evidence from Tones and Initials. In Comparative Kadai: Linguistic studies beyond Tai. Edited by Jerold A. Edmondson and David B. Solnit. Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics No. 86: 239–288.
Haudricourt, André-G. 1967. "La langue lakkia." Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 57 / Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de de Paris 62:1:165-182.
Lan Qingyuan 蓝庆元. 2011. Lajiayu yanjiu 拉珈语研究. Nanning: Guangxi Normal University Press 广西师范大学出版社.
Solnit, David B. 1988. "The position of Lakkia within Kadai." In Comparative Kadai: Linguistic studies beyond Tai, Jerold A. Edmondson and David B. Solnit (eds.). pages 219–238. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 86. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Su Defu [苏德富], et al. 1992. Chashan Yao yanjiu wenji 茶山瑤研究文集. Beijing: Minzu University: 中央民族学院出版社.
