Lao (language)

Lao (language), language known also as Laotian, of the Tai family, spoken by some four or five million inhabitants of Laos, in Indochina, and of northern and eastern Thailand. It closely resembles Thai but shows certain phonetic differences, notably the retention of six tones that are reduced to five in Thai; the simplification of consonant clusters, as in the substitution of k for kl and p for pr; and other substitutions, such as s for c and h for r. Lao is a literary language of some antiquity, but its literature is little known in the West. The standard eastern Lao script is closely related to Thai writing, but the several northern Lao alphabets more closely resemble the writing of the Shan people of Myanmar and southern China, and appear to represent a different graphic tradition. However, all these scripts can be traced to Indo-Aryan (Indic) origins.