The Hlai languages (Chinese: 黎语; pinyin: Líyǔ) are a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family spoken in the mountains of central and south-central Hainan in China by the Hlai people, not to be confused with the colloquial name for the Leizhou branch of Min Chinese (Chinese: 黎话; pinyin: Líhuà). They include Cun, whose speakers are ethnically distinct. A quarter of Hlai speakers are monolingual. None of the Hlai languages had a writing system until the 1950s, when the Latin script was adopted for Ha.
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Classification
Norquest (2007) classifies the Hlai languages as follows. There are some 750,000 Hlai speakers.
Nadou is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the two villages of Nàdòu 那斗村 (in Xīnlóng Town 新龙镇) and Yuè 月村 (in Bāsuǒ Town 八所镇), in Dongfang, Hainan. Speakers refer to themselves as lai¹¹ and are officially classified by the Chinese government as ethnic Han Chinese.
Jiāmào 加茂 (52,000 speakers) is a divergent Kra-Dai language with a Hlai superstratum and a non-Hlai substratum.
Reconstruction
The Proto-Hlai language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Hlai languages. Proto-Hlai reconstructions include those of Matisoff (1988), Thurgood (1991), Ostapirat (2004), and Norquest (2007).
Phonology
The following displays the phonological features of the modern Hlai dialects:
Consonants
[ɬ], [f] mainly occur word-initially among various dialects. [ɬ] may also be realized as [tɬ].
[x], [ɣ] mainly occur among the Xifang dialects.
[ɣ] can also occur as an allophone of /ɡ/.
/t͡s/, /t͡sʰ/, /z/ are pronounced as alveolo-palatal sounds [t͡ɕ], [t͡ɕʰ], [ɕ], among other various dialects.
/r/ can have allophones as [ɾ, dɾ].
For a brief period of time Yuanmen distinguished /m/ and /ɱ/ after */ŋw/ became /ɱ/ which soon merged with /m/.
Vowels
Among other Hlai dialects, /a, i, e, o/ can have allophones of [ɐ, ɪ, ɛ, ɔ].
Vowel sounds /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are common among the Baisha and Jiamao dialects.
/ə/ occurs among some dialects.
History
Liang & Zhang (1996:18–21) conclude that the original homeland of the Hlai languages was the Leizhou Peninsula, and estimate that the Hlai had migrated across the Hainan Strait to Hainan Island about 4,000 years before present.
According to Ostapirat (2026), Hlai originated much further to the southwest from north-central Vietnam. The ancestors of present-day Hlai speakers migrated directly to southern Hainan but not northern Hainan, since they followed a migration route that skipped the Leizhou Peninsula.