Caijia: Cross-dialectal Documentation of A Highly Endangered Language in Guizhou Province of China

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

Caijia is an extremely endangered language spoken by less than 1,000 Cai people (Bureau of Ethnic Identification in Bijie 1982), a group with a very small population scattered in northwestern Guizhou Province of China. It is the language used inside the family-based communities of Cai. The genetic affiliation of Caijia remains unclear. This project aims to document several dialects of Caijia spoken in Weining, Hezhang and Liupanshui counties of Guizhou and yields corpora of audio, video, and text data, a sketch grammar, a collection of stories as well as a comprehensive dictionary with English and Mandarin translations. Primary investigator: Lan Li

Project Details


Location: China, China, Mexico, China, Central America, Eastern Asia, Asia, Americas Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): Southern University of Science and Technology Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £94,123.00 Commencement Date: 01/2014 Project Status: Active
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