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Concept
Wa language
Summary
Wa (Va) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Wa people of Myanmar and China. There are three distinct varieties, sometimes considered separate languages; their names in Ethnologue are Parauk, the majority and standard form; Vo (Zhenkang Wa, 40,000 speakers) and Awa (100,000 speakers), though all may be called Wa, Awa, Va, Vo. David Bradley (1994) estimates there are total of 820,000 Wa speakers.
Gerard Diffloth refers to the Wa geographic region as the "Wa corridor", which lies between the Salween and Mekong Rivers. According to Diffloth, variants include South Wa, "Bible Wa" and Kawa (Chinese Wa).
Christian Wa are more likely to support the use of Standard Wa, since their Bible is based on a standard version of Wa, which is in turn based on the variant spoken in Bang Wai, 150 miles north of Kengtung (Watkins 2002). Bang Wai is located in Northern Shan State, Burma, close to the Chinese border where Cangyuan County is located.
Certain dialects of Wa preserve a final -/s/. They include the variants spoken in Meung Yang and Ximeng County (such as a variety spoken in Zhongke 中课, Masan 马散, Ximeng County that was documented by Zhou & Yan (1984)) (Watkins 2002:8).
David Bradley (1994) estimates that there is a total of about 500,000 Wa speakers in Burma.
A small number of Wa speakers also reside in Taunggyi, Mandalay and Yangon.
The PRC writing system for Wa is based on the Wa variant in Aishuai, Cangyuan County, Yunnan.
David Bradley (1994) estimates that there are 322,000 Wa speakers in China. In China, the Wa people live in (Watkins 2002):
Ximeng County (83% of total)
Cangyuan County (71% of total)
Menglian County (over 25% of total; other ethnic groups include the Dai and Lahu)
Gengma County
Shuangjiang County
Lancang County
A small number of Wa speakers also reside in Kunming and throughout various parts of Yunnan.
The three dialects of Wa (and their respective subdialects) according to Zhou et al. (2004) are:
1.
Official source
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