Be language


Be, also known as Ong Be, Bê, or Vo Limgao, is a language spoken by 600,000 people, 100,000 of them monolingual, on the north-central coast of Hainan Island, including the suburbs of the provincial capital Haikou. The speakers are being counted as part of "Han Chinese" nationality in census. According to Ethnologue, it is taught in primary schools.

Names

Be speakers refer to themselves as ', with ' being the prefix for persons and ' meaning 'village'. Liang notes that it is similar to the autonym ', by which Gelong 仡隆 speakers refer to themselves.

Classification

Be is a Kra–Dai language, but its precise relationship to other branches within the Kra-Dai family has yet not been conclusively determined. Hansell considers Be to be a sister of the Tai branch based on shared vocabulary, and proposes a Be–Tai grouping.
Based on toponymic evidence from place names with the prefix dya-, Jinfang Li considers Be to have originated from the Leizhou peninsula of Guangdong province.
Weera Ostapirat, analyzing data from Zhang, notes that Be and Jizhao share many lexical similarities and sound correspondences, and that Jizhao may be a remnant Be-related language on the Chinese mainland.

Dialects

Be consists of the Lincheng 临城 and Qiongshan 琼山 dialects. Liang documents the following varieties of Be.
Be of Chengmai is intermediate between the Lincheng and Qiongshan dialects, and has features of both.
Chen contains extensive comparative lexical data for the Be dialects of Changliu, Yongxing, Longtang, Qiaotou, Huangtong, and Xinying. The Qiaotou, Huangtong, and Xinying dialects are unintelligible with the Changliu, Yongxing, Longtang, and Shishan dialects. Chen also reconstructs Proto-Ong-Be on the basis of this comparative lexical data.

Classification

Chen classifies the Ong-Be dialects into two groups, which are mutually unintelligible with each other.
;Western Ong-Be
;Eastern Ong-Be
Liang considers Be to have migrated to Hainan from the Leizhou Peninsula of Guangdong about 2,500 years ago during the Warring States Period, but not over 3,000 years ago. Liang & Zhang also believe that Be had migrated from the Leizhou Peninsula to northern Hainan about 2,500 years ago during the Warring States period.