Bai language

Bai is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by more than 1.3 million people of the Bai ethnic group, primarily in Yunnan Province, China, as of a 2003 estimate. Its precise relationship to Chinese is disputed, with scholars proposing it is either an early offshoot from Chinese, a sister language to Chinese, or a more distantly related member of Sino-Tibetan. A 1984 classification by Xu and Zhao divides Bai into three dialects, Jianchuan in the center, Dali in the south and Bijiang in the north, with the more divergent northern varieties, including Panyi and Lama, sometimes treated separately; the language has open syllables, a rich vowel inventory and eight tones split into modal and non-modal phonation groups. Bai was formerly written with the Bowen script, a logographic system adapted from Chinese characters, and since 1958 has used a Latin-based alphabet, revised in 1982 and 1993.