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Aiming at the inaccurate phoneme segmentation problem caused by the lack of consideration of Lao language tone changes and audio diversity in existing methods, this paper proposes an unsupervised phoneme segmentation method for Lao language with multi-feature interaction fusion. Firstly, self-supervised features, spectral features and pitch features are independently coded to avoid the insufficiency of a single feature. Secondly, multiple independent features are gradually fused based on the attention mechanism, so that the model can more comprehensively capture the information of Lao language tone changes and phoneme boundaries. Finally, a learnable framework is adopted to optimize the phoneme segmentation model. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the R-value by 27.88% on the Lao phoneme segmentation task compared with the baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the linguistic literature on the languages of ethnic Lao in Thailand, labels such as "Lao" or "Lao Wiang" are often used to identify local dialects as Lao varieties. This study examines patterns of tonal splits and mergers in the linguistic varieties spoken by the so-called "Lao" ethnic groups in Chachoengsao Province, Thailand, to re-identify and reclassify the so called "Lao" languages collected from 124 participants at 50 locations. This study used the tone box concept (Gedney 1972) as a basic tool to analyse tonal patterns. The results indicate that the "Lao" ethnic languages of Chachoengsao can be classified into three main groups, namely Lao, Phuan and Hua Phan Tai Nuea. While the Lao varieties show typical tonal patterns of Lao dialects (B≠DL, C1=DL123 and/or C234=DL4), the other two groups show none of the patterns. The findings show that the patterns of tonal development labels are better criteria than ethnic labels in the identification of Lao groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tai Dam [blt] is a Southwestern Tai (< Kra-Dai) language spoken in Vietnam, Laos, China, and Thailand with approximately 750,000 speakers (Simons & Fennig 2017). The Tai Viet script has been used for centuries to write Tai Dam and other Tai languages. Because the Tai Viet script is not taught in schools, however, some Tai Dam readers prefer to use adaptations of the Vietnamese and Lao orthographies for writing Tai Dam. This paper describes Tai Dam orthographies in the Tai Viet, Lao, and Roman scripts. Particular focus is given to the way writers have faced the challenge of tonal mismatch between Tai Dam and Vietnamese or Lao by borrowing tone marking devices from one script to another, and to the sociolinguistic implications of these tone marking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to recent calls in the leadership studies literature for anthropologically informed empirical research on leadership phenomena in non-Western and non-Anglophone settings. The authors have worked extensively on rural development projects in Laos and draw on ethnographic ‘observant-participation’ and interview data to explore how leadership is construed in a contested terrain where traditional concepts intersect with those of official government and international development agencies. A theoretical discussion of linguistic relativity and the socially constitutive nature of language in general is offered as background justification for studying the language of leadership in context. The anthropological distinction between etic and emic operations is also introduced to differentiate between various interpretative positions that can be taken in relation to the fieldwork and data discussed in this paper. The study shows how difficult it can be for native Lao speakers to find words to describe leadership or give designations to ‘leaders’ outside of officially sanctioned semantic and social fields. A key finding of the study is that, viewed from the perspective of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, authority and leadership are coextensive. This social fact is reflected in the linguistic restrictions on what can and cannot be described as leadership in Laos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines laowai writing in Mainland China as an area of literary production. Laowai is the usual designation and frequent self-designation of China-resident Western foreigners and constitutes an identifiable migrant community in urban China. These laowai texts are written by and intended for a particular ethnically identifiable audience and constitute a body of work that is linguistically, culturally, and thematically distinct from other Anglophone writing on China. These works reflect the dialogic production of a new ethnic or pseudo-ethnic subject developing out of the gap between China-resident Western foreigners and the Chinese society to which they cannot be assimilated. Since Chinese society affords little room for hybrid identities among Western resident groups, the result is insideroutsider writing, which is deeply engaged with the fraught race and gender relations between Chinese and Western subjects in the cities of China. This group, socioeconomically privileged but culturally marginal, challenges both Chinese and foreign narratives about China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard Lao, the official language in the Lao PDR, is spoken in and around the capital Vientiane. Lexicon, vowels and especially tone inventories of the many Lao dialects in the nation differ tremendously. A new orthography to replace the traditional Pali-based orthography which was hard to teach and learn was established during the Lao language reform in 1975. This study investigates the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of Lao orthography and its applicability to other languages in the multilingual nation. After a short introduction to the Lao language and the linguistic situation in the country, the Lao phoneme inventory and a description of the nature and historical development of Lao script are presented, including some taxonomic considerations discussing the segmental, suprasegmental and syllabic features of this script. This is followed by a linguistic evaluation of the orthography and a summary in the light of how to apply Lao script to other languages spoken in the country. Three minority orthographies based on Lao script illustrate that the almost entirely direct phonemic correspondences, consistency in the formation of multigraphs, the rich grapheme inventory and the both segmental and syllabic characteristics of this semi-alphabetic script support a direct application to other, even unrelated languages with contrastive suprasegmental features like tone or voice quality. No orthography testing or studies on literacy acquisition have been done on these or any other Lao-script based minority scripts yet, so that firm recommendations regarding the creation of new Lao-script based orthographies cannot be given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to provide a specific case study of the contradictory discourses concerning Lao as the national language, as the official language, and as the medium of instruction. Through the diglossia framework or Lao as a touch stone, the article investigates how non-mainstream and ethnic minority students use the national language in comparison to their mother tongues and other languages at schools. The result shows that students often use their mother tongue and other non-national language to negotiate their social positions among the majority and the dominant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape the contexts produced in speaking that language. In this article, we propose a third locus of linguistic relativity. Our argument is based on recent work in conversation analysis that has shown how the resources of a given language provide the tools for accomplishing basic actions in interaction. To develop our argument, we consider the way in which the resources of three different languages (Caribbean English Creole, Finnish, and Lao) are deployed by speakers to agree with a prior assessment while at the same time claiming greater epistemic authority over the matter assessed. Our case study indicates that the language-specific tools used to accomplish this action (the lexicogrammatical resources) introduce collateral effects and in this way give the action a local spin or inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having gone through a colonial history and colonial language policies similar to those of many African countries, Cambodia, the Lao PDR, Myanmar and Vietnam have all chosen a different path when it comes to language policy, opting against retaining a European language (i.e., English or French) and choosing instead Khmer, Lao, Myanma and Vietnamese respectively, as their national and official languages. Taking a closer look at the linguistic situations in these countries, this paper asks whether a national language policy makes a difference when it comes to a multilingual context. In other words, is there a perceptible difference in the language policies of these countries and those of most African countries that can be attributed to the choice of the national and/or official language? More importantly, can a national/official language policy resolve the fundamental issues of development in multilingual contexts? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Lao People's Democratic Republic has speakers of up to 230 different languages belonging to four ethnolinguistic families, the Lao Government's policy as stated in its Education Law is that Lao is the official language of education at all levels. This creates a challenging situation for teachers in ethnic minority villages throughout the country, where students often begin school with no knowledge of the Lao language. This paper explores the language practices of one teacher in a combined Grade 3 and 4 ethnic minority classroom. It describes how this teacher balances the constraints on him to use Lao as the central language of teaching with his belief in using the students' mother tongue to allow effective teaching and learning to occur. The teacher uses the students' L1 not only in the ways expected of him by national-level policy-makers and planners, or in those often described in the literature on similar contexts, but also in unexpected and creative ways. This has important implications for education policy and planning, particularly in areas such as teacher recruitment, training and deployment, as well as for our understanding of bi- and multilingual classroom behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper surveys the structure of questions and their responses in Lao, a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Data are from video-recordings of naturally occurring conversation in Vientiane, Laos. An outline of the lexico-grammatical options for formulating questions describes content (‘WH’) questions and polar (‘yes/no’) questions. The content question forms are from a set of indefinite pronouns. The WHAT, WHERE, and WHO categories have higher token frequency than the other categories. Polar questions are mostly formed by the addition of different turn-final markers, with different meanings. ‘Declarative questions’ (i.e., polar questions which are formally identical to statements) are common. An examination of the interactional functions of questions in the data show asymmetries between polar and content questions, with content questions used mostly for requesting information, while polar questions are also widely used for requesting confirmation, among other things. There is discussion of the kinds of responses that are appropriate or preferred given certain types of question. Alongside discussion of numerous examples, the paper provides quantitative data on the frequencies of various patterns in questions and responses. These data form part of a large-scale, ten-language coding study. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The approach to pragmatics explored in this article focuses on elements of social interaction which are of universal relevance, and which may provide bases for a comparative approach. The discussion is anchored by reference to a fragment of conversation from a video-recording of Lao speakers during a home visit in rural Laos. The following points are discussed. First, an understanding of the full richness of context is indispensable for a proper understanding of any interaction. Second, human relationships are a primary locus of social organization, and as such constitute a key focus for pragmatics. Third, human social intelligence forms a universal cognitive under-carriage for interaction, and requires careful cross-cultural study. Fourth, a neo-Peircean framework for a general understanding of semiotic processes gives us a way of stepping away from language as our basic analytical frame. It is argued that in order to get a grip on pragmatics across human groups, we need to take a comparative approach in the biological sense—i.e. with reference to other species as well. From this perspective, human pragmatics is about using semiotic resources to try to meet goals in the realm of social relationships. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Different domains of concrete referential semantics have provided testing grounds for investigation of the differential roles of perception, cognition, language, and culture in human categorization. A vast literature on semantics of biological classification, color, shape and topological relations, artifacts, and more, raises a range of theoretical and analytical debates. This article uses landscape terms to address a key debate from within research on ethnobiological classification: the opposition between so-called utilitarian and intellectualist accounts for patterns of lexicalization of the natural world [Berlin, B., 1992. Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ]. ‘Utilitarianists’ argue that lexical categories reflect practical consequences of knowing certain category distinctions, related to cultural practice and functional affordances of referents. ‘Intellectualists’ argue that lexical categories reflect people’s innate interest in the natural world, combined with the perceptual discontinuities supplied by ‘Nature’s Plan’. The debate is generalizable to other domains, including landscape terminology, the topic of this special issue. This article brings landscape terminology into this larger debate, arguing in favor of a utilitarian account of linguistic categories in the domain of landscape, but proposing a significant revision to the concept of utility in linguistic categorization. The proposal is that for linguistic categorization, what is at issue is not (primarily) the utility of the referent (e.g. a river), but the utility of the word (e.g. the English word river). By considering how landscape terms are actually used in conversation, we see that they are deployed in communicative contexts which fit a rich, ‘functionalist’ semantics. A landscape term is not employed for mere referring, but functions to bring particular associated ideas into social discourse. In turn, language use reveals a range of evidence for the semantic content of any such term, of utility both to the language learner and to the semanticist. This kind of evidence can be argued to underlie the acquisition of semantic categories in language learning. The arguments are illustrated with examples from Lao, a Tai language of mainland Southeast Asia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

While there are infinite conceivable events of material separation, those actually encoded in the conventions of a given language's verb semantics number only a few. Furthermore, there appear to be crosslinguistic parallels in the native verbal analysis of this conceptual domain. What are the operative distinctions, and why these? This article analyses a key subset of the bivalent (transitive) verbs of cutting and breaking in Lao. I present a decompositional analysis of the verbs glossed cut (off), cut.into.with.placed.blade, cut.into.with.moving.blade, and snap, pursuing the idea that the attested combinations of sub-events have a natural logic to them. Consideration of the nature of linguistic categories, as distinct from categories in general, suggests that the attested distinctions must have ethnographic and social interactional significance, raising new lines of research for cognitive semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article presents a description of nominal expressions for parts of the human body conventionalised in Lao, a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Northeast Thailand, and Northeast Cambodia. An inventory of around 170 Lao expressions is listed, with commentary where some notability is determined, usually based on explicit comparison to the metalanguage, English. Notes on aspects of the grammatical and semantic structure of the set of body part terms are provided, including a discussion of semantic relations pertaining among members of the set of body part terms. I conclude that the semantic relations which pertain between terms for different parts of the body not only include part/whole relations, but also relations of location, connectedness, and general association. Calling the whole system a ‘partonomy’ attributes greater centrality to the part/whole relation than is warranted. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines video recordings of spontaneous interaction among speakers of Lao (Southwestern Tai, Laos). Analysis of the two Lao demonstrative determiners nii[sup -4] and nan[sup 4]; Testing of a hypothesis of minimal encoded semantics against rich contextual information.