Two textbooks aimed at pupils in Yunnan have been approved and will soon be published (傣文教材出炉): Dai Reader IV for Xishuangbanna Elementary School Students (西双版纳傣文小学教材第四册) and Follow Me in Dai! (跟我学傣文). The Dai Reader consists of 30 texts, 19 traditonal Dai pieces and 11 translations (I assume from Chinese). Follow Me in Dai! will be available in digital format.
According to Wikipedia’s Dai People (傣族), there are approximately 1.2m Dai in the PRC, 134,000 in Laos and 145,000 in Thailand. Those in China mainly speak one of two dialects: Dailü or Dai Nüa, and both are part of the Tai language group that includes Thai, Lao and Zhuang. “Various dialects of the Tai/Dai language family are spoken from Assam India to Taiwan and Shanxi Province in the North to [Indonesia’s] Java in the south,” notes Wikipedia.
In fact, the term “Dai” has been used officially in China—replacing “Tai” or “Thai”—only since 1953. If the goal of this policy was to create the impression among the mainstream Han that Dai people, language and culture are unique to China, it has been fairly successful. Even in Kunming, provincial capital of Yunnan, just a day’s bus ride from Xishuangbanna, most locals I meet are largely unaware that the Dai and their language are closely related to the country known as Thailand.
This reminds me of a visit I made to Kashgar in western Xinjiang near the ‘Stans (Uzbekistan, etc.). Linguists estimate that the language spoken by Xinjiang’s Uyghurs shares up to 70 percent of its vocabulary with modern Turkish, which isn’t surprising since both are Turkic tongues. But the young Uighurs I met in my brief stay there rejected the idea that their language or culture shares its roots with today’s Turkey. They appeared to be ignorant of any ties.
AfroLit4China 