LAO LINGUISTICSTH
IN THE 20 CENTURY AND SINCE

N. J. EnfieldL

aos shows a very high degree of linguistic diversity, with up to 100 languages,
from five different major language families, spoken in an area smaller than the
United Kingdom. This degree of diversity makes Laos an important place not
only for linguistic science, but for human science. Languages may have little incommon, but they spring from the same fundamental conditions: groups of humanbeings in tightly-knit and historically continuous social association. Since all humanindividuals share the same genetic make-up required for language acquisition - and thismeans acquisition of any human language to which a child is exposed - then to examine
the limits of variation in language is to address a fundamental human question. Those
who conduct research on the grammatical and semantic structures of languages spoken
in Laos are contributors to this project.
To cover current research on all languages of Laos would require more space than isavailable here. I restrict my attention mainly to research on the national language Lao fromthe fIrst half of the 20 th century to the present. The main focus is research on grammar, bywhich I mean the fonnallinguistic structuring of information, in particular the encoding ofconcepts in morphosyntactic structure, grammatical constructions, and to some degree inwords and other lexical items. Since grammar is embedded within a larger social andsemiotic system, I also discuss a number of contexts for Lao grammar, including other Tai
languages, issues oflanguage contact and multilingualism, co-speech gesticulation, and theorganization of conversation.

LAO
Most research on the grammar oflanguages spoken in Laos has concerned Lao, the nationallan~ge (Enfield, 1999). During the period of French rule in Laos (1893-1954) and up to
the hme around the establishment of the Lao People's Democratic Republic in 1975, several
grammars of Lao appeared, written essentially in the style of European pedagogicalgrammars (Hospitalier, 1937; Vongvichit, 1967; RLG, 1972; Reinhorn, 1980; Nginn, 1984).
Some intellectual activity was ostensibly devoted to grammar, but this mostly related toorthographic (spelling) conventions, though to some degree also concerned research on the436

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lexicon. This included most notably the work of Sila Vrravong, P. S. Nginn, and Phoumi
Vongvichit. The traditions of scholarship (and politics) associated with these three men are
discussed in detail in Enfield (1999), so I devote no further discussion to them here.
An important recent development for the state of research on grammar in Laos is
the Lao government's 2002 establishment of a Linguistic Research Institute, within the
Ministry of Information and Culture of the Lao PDR. The institute director Dr.
Thongphet Kingsada (PhD in Linguistics, Hanoi University) is also chief editor of alinguistic journal entitled Language and Life, which first appeared in January 2003. The
first edition includes ten brief articles (three in English) on topics ranging from
"Buddhism and the Lao language" to "Languages and Ethnic Classification in the Lao
PDR" to "Lao Writing and Word Breaks" to a study of the morpho syntactic
differentiation in Lao between the numerals '2lO0' and '2001 '. Comparable venues for
publication of such research in linguistics during the Royal Lao Government era (Evans,
2002: 93ft) included publications of the Literary Committee (e.g. RLG, 1972; Enfield,
1999) and the Royal Academic Council (e.g. Dejvongsa et aI, 1972). There was nothingof this kind in the Lao PDR era until the establishment in 1988 of the Institute of
Ethnography (within the Committee for Social Sciences) and a later offspring, the still
extant Institute for Cultural Research (under the Ministry of Information and Culture).
The Institute for Cultural Research established an academic journal in 1996, theLanxang Heritage Journal. During the few years of its existence, the journal provided
the only regular outlet for academic publication of linguistic research by Lao scholars.
Otherwise, articles on linguistic matters appear in popular publications such as various
Lao language newspapers and periodicals. These tend to be prescriptive discussions ofstyle, or curiosities of 'correct' and 'incorrect' usage. Like their counterparts in otherparts of the world, such studies are fun to read, but their main appeal to scholarship
relates less to their intended contribution to what we know about the structure oflanguage, and more to their ethnographic appeal as socio-culturally loaded attempts toportray or manipulate the standard language in various ways.

TYPOLOGICAL/DESCRIPTIVE WORK ON LAO
Two significant grammars of Lao written in French during the 20th century are Hospitalier(1937) and Reinhom (1980). Hospitalier (1937) is a formidable and penetrating treatmentof the Lao language. J.-J. Hospitalier clearly had a thorough knowledge of Lao, evident
for example in a brief but insightful section on intetjections. His discussion of word
formation in Lao was similarly incisive. Standards of description in linguistics at the time
meant that certain important features of the Lao grammatical system were not described.
For example, Hospitalier did not have the means to properly characterize the system oflexical tone in Lao, and he did not transcribe tone in his transcription of Lao examples.
About half the book concerns the language's sound system, including its system ofwriting, and the system for reading tones correctly. Hospitalier evidently went to a great
deal of trouble to get permission from the French authorities to use a Lao font in thispublication. Generally, Hospitalier used French grammatical categories as a guide foranalyzing Lao - for example, calling classifiers in one of their functions articles, in another"categories les plus usitees"; or listing stative verbs as adjectives with sub-types like"determinative adjective". For its time, the Hospitalier grammar was an impressive
achievement, and it has hardly been bettered in the 79 years since.
Reinhorn's grammar (1980) shows some evidence of its more modem
intellectual context, with greater attention paid to features of phonological structuresuch as tones and the set of contrasts in vowel space. But there are no references to

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literature on linguistic typology, nor is there any theoretically oriented discussionof the cross-linguistic status of Lao grammatical structures. The orientation is more
to literature than to linguistics, with much attention paid to Indic features of thelanguage - i.e. its orthography and some of its vocabulary. (These aspects of thelanguage are considered superficial in theoretical linguistics.) Reinhorn devotes asignificant amount of space to morphological analysis of lndic loan words,
including lndic affixation and rules of sandhi and vowel mutation in Sanskritic
compounds. These phenomena are indeed observable in borrowings, but they are
not part of the productive morphosyntactic structures of the Lao language. Besides,
most of the borrowings to which those observations apply are exclusive torestricted socially higher contexts such as literature and higher education, not tomost of the everyday use of Lao. While by the time of publication of Reinhorn's
grammar it had already become standard in linguistic reference grammars to use
examples derived from naturally occurring texts, Reinhorn, like Hospitalier in
1937, relied on constructed examples. The treatment of Lao is prescriptive as much
if not more than it is descriptive. The disproportionate amount of attention
Reinhorn gives to lndic features of Lao further distances the description from thelanguage as it is actually used by most people.
Hospitalier's Lao grammar was written while Laos was a colony of France,with the ostensive purpose of providing a pedagogical resource for French people
who would travel to Laos for professional purposes. Its simple and pragmatic stylereflects this raison d'etre. The book is organized in the style of traditional
European grammar, with no orientation to the value of a description of Lao to thescience of linguistics or anthropology. This fits with its historical context, having
been completed before the appearance of Bloomfield's classic and influential
descriptivist treatise Language (Bloomfield, 1933). Reinhorn's book, on the other
hand, was written at a time when major developments had taken place in linguistic
theory, through developments in structuralism (in both linguistics andanthropology), the cognitivist/generativist movement in linguistics, and thecomparative science of language typology. Nevertheless, Reinhorn devotes little if
any attention to the possible contribution a grammar of Lao might have made to
linguistics and anthropology.
The two French language grammars are similar to grammars written in Laos
(Viravong, 1962; Vongvichit, 1967; RLG, 1972) in that their analysis of Lao follows
distinctions in grammatical meaning traditionally made in European languages, such as
categories of 'conjugation', 'mood' and 'inflection' of the verb. (A significant
difference between Lao and the average European language is that Lao lacks precisely
these categories!) Most points of grammatical analysis of this kind are not supportedwith language internal arguments along the lines supplied by modem standard
reference grammars. Rather, the grammarian is here describing Lao in terms of theresources it has for expressing the grammatical distinctions one has in ~r~nch or s?~eother 'standard average European' grammar (Hospitalier makes it exphclt that thIS IS
his purpose). Nevertheless, in these traditional grammars there is some attention tofeatures of Lao not shared with European languages -for example, in discussion o~the'classifier' system (Enfield, 2004b). However, in describing this system neIther
Hospitalier nor Reinhorn give an analysis of its semantic/morphosyntactic structure orfunction, but simply supply a list of forms.
From a modem linguistic point of view, there are a number of features of ~ao notnormally found in European languages and which would nowadays be descnbed on

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their own terms. One example is the phenomenon of serial verb constructions, a type ofcomplex clause structure that Lao and many other languages - but not European
languages like French - feature, cf Durie 1997, Aikhenvald and Dixon, 2005. Suchstructures are mentioned here and there in existing Lao grammars, but, unlike in earlygrammars of African languages, no attention is drawn to their identity as a distinct
grammatical category in the language. Another, clearer example - a kind of test case concerns the large category of expressives or ideophones in Lao (Crisfield, 1978;
Chapman, 1996; Wayland, 1996; Trongdee, 1996; cf. Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz, 2001).
A few examples appear in a paragraph of Reinhorn (1980: 119), mixed in with
examples of other types under the heading 'onomatopoeics' as a subsection of'predicatives of manner' . Reinhorn does not recognize the distinct grammatical identityof expressives (as established, for example by the fact that they cannot be directly
negated; cf. Chapman, 1994). This may be due to a lack of recognition of this status, or
perhaps a lack of recognition that a system of this kind - very much colloquial- has aplace in a serious grammatical description. Diffloth (2004; cf. 1972, 1976, 1979) argues
that one of the reasons that an analysis of these words is hard to pin down is that, likeinterjections (ouch!, etc.), they tend not to be regarded by speakers (or grammarians) as
part of real language.
Few scholarly articles were dedicated to linguistic analysis of Lao in the
20 th century. A rare example from the 1940s is Edward G. Roffe's (1946) concise
structuralist account of Lao phonemic structure. In the 1970s, a number of scholars
associated with Nguyen Dang Liem and others working in the 'tagmemic' tradition at
the University of Hawaii made passing references to Lao in broader discussions ofgrammatical features of Southeast Asian languages (Capell 1979; Nguyen, 1974,
1979; Clark, 1974, 1979). This work ranges in quality. Among these, Honts (1979)
is one of the few scholarly articles dedicated solely to Lao to be published in the
20 th century. Marybeth Clark's sound and insightful work began in this period and has
sporadically appeared through subsequent decades (Clark & Prasithrathsint, 1985;
Clark, 1985, 1989, 1995). A highlight of the Hawaii-based research in the 1970s is
the work of Arthur Crisfield, whose insightful discussion of Lao sentence-final
particles (Crisfield, 1974) is the best we have to date on this topic. Crisfield's (1978)
University of Hawaii PhD dissertation dealt with 'Sound symbolism and theexpressive words of Lao'. This topic has since been investigated by Adam Chapman
in an Australian National University sub-thesis (Chapman, 1994), and by Ratree
Wayland, in a study of a variety of Lao spoken in Thailand (Wayland, 1996; cf. also
Trongdee, 1996). (Chapman has since turned his research focus to Lao
ethnomusicology; Chapman, 2001, 2002, 2003.)
The most recent grammatical description of Lao is a German language grammar
written by Boike Rehbein and Sisouk Sayaseng (2004). These two had earlier createda language learning course book (Rehbein & Sayaseng, 1997), followed by adictionary (Sayaseng & Rehbein, 2000). This short grammar whose sub-title is'phonology, morphology, and pragmatics' is a useful inventory of basic structures andgrammatical forms, but the authors do not have space to do much more than simply
list examples of each descriptive distinction, along with brief explanations. Like
previous grammars, there is no detailed analysis of structures or typologicalcomparison, and some features of the language's structure are not mentioned at all(e.g. expressives; see above). In its favor, the Rehbein and Sayaseng grammar goesbeyond previous grammars in paying attention to social dimensions of language suchas speech level, formality, and politeness (chap. 4 & 5). This is thanks to Rehbein's
perspective as a sociologist and anthropologist.

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439

Much of my own work on Lao has been typological/descriptive, covering a rangeof topics, including semantic/grammatical studies of specific lexical domains (Enfield,
2002a; 2002b; 2006a; 2007 e), the relation between semantic encoding and pragmatic
implicature (Enfield, 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2007c), processes of grammaticalization,
particularly concerning the well-worn path from verb to verb marker (Enfield, 2001a;
2003d; 2004a), lexical semantics (Enfield, 1997; 2001b; 2002c; 2007a), andexplorations of theoretical issues in morpho syntactic description and analysis, making
primary reference to data from Lao (Enfield, 2002d; 2002e; 2005g; 2006c). In addition,
ongoing preparation of a reference grammar of Lao (Enfield, 2007d) has produced anumber of descriptive grammatical studies, including descriptions of multi-verb
constructions (Enfield, in press), systems of nominal classification (Enfield, 2004b),
depictive and other secondary predication (Enfield, 2005a), 'adjectives' (Enfield,
2004c), expressives (Enfield, 2005b), and three-place predicates (Enfield, 2007b). The
aim of producing a reference grammar is to fill a gap left unfilled by 20th century
grammars of Lao, none of which adequately function as reference grammars by modem
standards of descriptive/typological linguistics.
Thai linguists are beginning to show genuine interest in Lao, but have tended toconcentrate on varieties of Lao spoken in northeast Thailand, rather than Lao spoken in
Laos (though this is changing). See, for example, studies of 'Lao' by Prakhong (1976),
Premchu (1979), and Theraphan (1979), cited by Wayland (1996: 218). Are the speechvarieties of the Isan region of northeast Thailand to be regarded as 'Lao'? I have argued(Enfield, 2002f) that this question concerns politics and ethnic identity more thanlinguistic criteria. Isan speech varieties have some commonalities and some differenceswith Lao as spoken in Laos, and there are significant differences among different
varieties in Isan, as well as within Laos. Whether we consider Isan varieties to be 'Lao'
Jr not depends on the nature and scope of our questions. Thanks to the changing
political situation which has made Laos more accessible to outsiders (at least
unofficially), Thai scholars have more recently been able to conduct research on Lao as
spoken in Laos itself. See, for example, Osatananda's (1997) University of Hawaii
dissertation on 'Tone in Vientiane Lao'.

LEXICOGRAPHY
Much of the lexicographic work on Lao is in French, such as Guignard's early
dictionary (1912) and Reinhorn's (1970) tomes. Kerr's (1972) two-volume Lao-English
dictionary is an unsurpassed English language source on the Lao lexicon. Importantsources for Kerr were French language botanical reference works (Vidal, 1960; Deuve,
1962; Deuve & Deuve, 1963-4), which continue to be important sources for many
foreigners working in rural development, biodiversity conservation, and other technicalareas. Marcus's (1970) concise Lao-English English-Lao dictionary is well known andWidely used, but is little more than a word list. The dictionary contains no examples andlittle grammatical information (see also Boonyavong, 1962). Recent Lao language
dictionaries, most notably Onmanisone (1992), are directly based on these Englis~ andFrench language sources. It is reportedly part of the mission of the newly establIshed~inguistic Research Institute to produce a definitive Lao language di~tionary whic.h
Improves upon previous efforts. Shortage of resources makes it unhkely that thIS
project will bear fruit in the near future.
.
Several lexicographic reference works on Lao have been produced i.n ~h~iland,mcluding a Lao-Thai-English Dictionary (LTED, 1999) and a Lao-ThaI dictIOnary(Viraphong, 2000). There is a plethora of reference material on the language ofIsan, the440

LAo LINGUISTICS IN THE 20TH CENTURY AND SINCE

Northeast region of Thailand (cf. for example Phinthong, 1988; Mollerup, 2001). The
volume of research being conducted on northeastern varieties of Thai reflects a
fascination among Thai scholars and laypeople with 'the Lao'. This fascination has led
to the appearance of popular publications on the 'charm' of the Lao language.
Lao language lexicography suffers from a problem characteristic of mostlexicography, namely a sacrifice of depth for breadth. Despite the large dictionaries andwordlists, there is little focused, in-depth, or theoretically oriented work on lexical
semantics (cf. Wierzbicka, 1985, 1996; Cruse, 1986). This is not a criticism of thedictionary makers who have devoted a great deal oftime collecting data and presenting itin accessible form. It is an issue for all lexicography, particularly where the purpose ofsuch work is to compare the details of lexical semantics across languages as part of thegeneral enterprise of linguistics, namely to establish the ways in which human languages
differ, given that the basic ingredients are universal.
PEDAGOGICAL MATERIAL

Probably the most accessible grammatical descriptions of Lao are pedagogical works
such as Roffe and Roffe (1958), Yates and Sayasithsena (1970, produced by the US
State Department during the Vietnam war), and Hoshino and Marcus (1981). Whilethese works are substantial, and include many illustrative examples, the analyses
presented are oriented neither to linguistic typology nor to theoretical or other generallinguistic issues. (Pedagogical works on other languages are more helpful in thisrespect; cf. Huffman's linguistically sophisticated 1970 description of Khmer.) Wright( 1994) is a sketch grammar of Lao ostensibly intended for language learners, publishedby the Thai journal Language and Linguistics (Department of Linguistics, Thammasat
University, Bangkok). This brief treatment is inaccessible as a general reference work
(i.e. for linguists rather than learners of Lao ) due to the author's decision to provide Laolanguage examples only in Lao script.
Most recently, John Hartmann, in collaboration with Arthur Crisfield and othercolleagues, has been developing practical materials for teaching Lao, making theseaccessible on an impressive 'Lao Language and Culture' website hosted by the Center
for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. A Lao language course bookfor speakers of German was published in 1997 (Sayaseng & Rehbein, 1997), followed
by a Lao-German German-Lao dictionary (Rehbein & Sayaseng, 2000). Recent years
have seen a spate of phrase books on sale in Laos, of varying quality (cf. e.g. Werner,
1992; Cummings, 1995; Callaghan, 1999). An impressive number of foreign residents
in Laos learn to speak functional if not excellent Lao. This is helped by the supportive
attitude of Lao speakers, and probably also by the fact that English is not widely spoken(making it more difficult to get by in Lao society without being able to speak Lao).
LAO AMONG TAl LANGUAGES

Lao, like Siamese, is one of many members of the Tai family of languages spoken in
Laos, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, and India. Most of the work on languages of
the Tai family in Laos (other than Lao) has concerned the study of the Tai language
family more generally, more specifically the comparative and historical study of Tai
languages (especially the southwestern branch). The progenitor of this tradition was
William J. Gedney (University of Michigan), whose Selected Papers On Comparative
Tai Studies (Gedney 1989) makes numerous references to Lao and other Tai languages
spoken in Laos. Gedney carried out extensive field work in Laos, beginning in the

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1940s. His many students continued his project (cf. the work of Bickner, Hartmann,
Hudak, Jit Phumisak, Wilaiwan, Chamberlain, Compton, Gething, Sarawit, andStrecker). For work on comparative rai, see edited collections such as Gething (1975),
Harris and Chamberlain (1975), Bickner, Hudak and Patcharin (1986), Edmondson andSolnit (1988), Compton and Hartmann (1992), Edmondson and Solnit (1997), Diller
and Edmondson (forthcoming), and the monograph by Luo (1997).
A minority of work in this tradition was carried out in Laos itself, and many
mentions of Lao and other rai languages of Laos are often made in passing rather thanbeing the focus of attention. However, not all of these workers overlooked Lao andother languages of Laos. Carol Compton's research has concentrated on Lao verse andsong structure as well as versification and rhyme in the spoken language (Compton,
1979,2004). James Chamberlain's work has focused on the comparative ethnobiologyof Tai languages (e.g. Chamberlain, 1975, 1992, 2000). Much recent work by
Chamberlain is based on extensive field work conducted in the course of consultancies
relating to the potential impact of major development projects on ethnic groups of thecountry's rural areas. This has been one of the only practical ways to gain access tominority language speech communities for the purposes of scientific research. Anotherimportant contributor is Anthony Diller (c£ Diller, 1988, 1992,2004), who has had along interest in Lao, and has taught it at the Australian National University. Morerecently, Diller has studied not only historical reconstruction and classification of Tai
languages within the Tai family, but historical semantics, or more specificallycomparative 'grarnmaticalization' (e.g. Diller 2001). Enfield (2003d) is an extended casestudy in this domain, which while concentrating on Lao, also provides primary data fromfield investigations of other Tai languages of Laos, including Thai Neua and Lue.
LANGUAGE CONTACT, MULTILINGUALISM, AREAL LINGUISTICS
Edmund Leach's (1954) case study of inter-cultural relations in highland Burmadescribed a situation closely related to that we find all over Laos. Leach investigatedsocial relations between the Shan, a Tai speaking group whose livelihood centers on
working rice paddies on flat land, and the Kachin (or Jingpoh), a Tibeto-Burman speaking
group whose livelihood centers on working neighboring hillside swidden fields. Leach's
study made the point that while neighboring ethnic groups may be of distinct cultural
backgrounds, they will nevertheless maintain structured social relations, cross-cutting thecultures that define their differences. This is the pattern found in much of Laos (e.g.
involving the Tai speaking 'lowland Lao', the Mon-Khmer speaking 'upland Lao', and/or
the Hmong-Mien or Tibeto-Burman speaking 'highland Lao'; cf. Bradley, 2003; Enfield,
200Sc, 2006d). The high level of ethnic and linguistic diversity in Laos means that there
is a complex web of linguistic and cultural contact, by which members of different
cultural groups and societies will be multilingual and multicultural to various degrees.
This sets up the way to convergence in the structure of linguistic and cultural systems.
The larger result of this is areal diffusion, i.e. the process whereby languages can become
structurally similar over time (Dixon and Aikhenvald, 2001; Enfield, 2003d, 2005c, 200Se,
2005g). The relationship between language contact, multilingualism, and areal diffusion
is still not well understood. Laos is an excellent laboratory for studying these issues.
LAO LANGUAGE AS PART OF A BROADER SEMIOTIC SYSTEM
Many linguists now recognize that production and comprehension of spoken
utterances are fundamentally linked to accompanying bodily/visual actions. Res.earchon hand gesture and other aspects of nonverbal behavior has become closely tted to442

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research on the psycho linguistics and semiotics of utterance construction (McNeill:
1985, 1992, 2000; Kendon: 1972, 1980, 1988; Goldin-Meadow: 1999, 2002, andreferences therein). Hand gestures and other bodily movements are closely integrated
with speech in their contribution to building 'the utterance', the semiotic andpsycholinguistic equivalent of the clause (cf Kendon: 1972, 1980; Chafe: 1976,
1980, 1994; McNeill: 1992, 2000). Gestures are now understood to have importantcognitive functions for both speakers and addressees. Some of my own recent studies
in Laos have been in this new tradition of research l . Enfield (200lc) is aninvestigation of lip-pointing (i.e. pointing by jutting the lips out while looking in the
direction of the referent), a common practice among the Lao, integrated with the useof demonstratives and other deictic speech elements. Related to this, Enfield and Kita
(2002) investigated the use of pointing gestures during spatial descriptions in
discourse by speakers of Lao. Two studies - Enfield (2003e, 2005d) - have comefrom an investigation of the structural properties of 'gesture diagrams', andspecifically their use for describing kinship relations and Lao kin terminology, their
iconic properties, and their implications for the study of kinship and diagrammatic
cognition. Enfield (2004d) presents a study of gestures made during native speakerdescriptions of types of Lao fish traps, in which it is demonstrated that sequences ofhand gestures show discourse-level syntactic organization.

LANGUAGE ENDANGERMENT
An important issue in the contemporary linguistics of Laos is language endangerment(Enfield, 2006e; 2005f). Languages around the world are disappearing at a rate ofsome two per month (Crystal, 2001; Nettle & Romaine, 2001). One area of research
relevant to the problem of language endangerment in Laos is exploration of theconditions and circumstances of language attrition and loss. There is a desperate needfor primary field research, given that we know very little about even the number andidentity of languages, let alone their structure. In Enfield (2006e), I discuss some of
the theoretical issues concerning language endangerment and research on it in Laos.
(See also Bradley, 2003.) There are many dozens of languages spoken in Laos, mostof which are spoken by fewer than 5,000 people. Some are moribund, with only a few
dozen speakers remaining. In this context, to claim that the national language Lao is'under pressure' (Thongphet, 2004) is a completely different notion to endangerment.
It is simply a way of dramatically expressing the idea that the language, like all
languages, is changing. It does not mean that - as in the case of many other languages
of Laos - the entire language and the community that speaks it is set to disappear
from the face of the earth.
Beyond sociological analysis oflanguage endangerment, a second area of researchin language endangerment is the far more difficult and time-consuming task ofsurveying and documenting endangered languages and the cultures, communities, andsocieties in which they are spoken. Dixon (1997) forcefully argues that a linguist's real
job is to produce reference descriptions of previously undescribed (or inadequately
described) languages. Most languages of Laos are both previously undescribed andseriously endangered (Enfield, 2006e). Only a handful of researchers are currently
active in systematic documentation of minority languages of Laos. Pascale Jacq andPaul Sidwell, for example, have carried out descriptive work on several languages of

1 Some work in social anthropology of Laos has paid attention to bodily practice in ritual (e. g. Evans, 1997), but not interms of the structural integration of bodily movements with speech.

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Southern Laos, with planned publication of a series of shorter grammars. Jacq (2002)
describes Jruq, an endangered Bahnaric language of Champasak Province. I am
currently undertaking a field-based description of Karii, a Vietic language of
Khammouane Province (Enfield, 2006b).
A different kind of language under threat is sign language of the Deaf (Nonaka,
2004). Sign languages are a little-appreciated and still relatively little-understood
manifestation of the world's linguistic diversity (Stokoe, 1960; Klima & BeUugi, 1985;
Emmorey, 2002). Deaf people are often isolated from each other in rural settings, butwhen in larger social association the Deaf will inevitably create conventions forlinguistic communication, and as long as there is a community to develop and maintainthose emerging conventions, a whole new language will arise (Senghas et ai, 2004).
Such communities are small, however, and often vulnerable. A Lao sign language iscurrently emerging in association with a recently established school for the Deaf at the
Ministry of Public Health Rehabilitation Centre, Khou Vieng Road, Vientiane. No
systematic research is being conducted on this process.

FINAL REMARK
Lao is the language of the Lao PDR's socially and politically dominant ethnic group.
The research attention it has received over the last century is highly disproportionate
to its status as just one among many dozens of languages spoken across the country.
Most languages of Laos are completely neglected in research. The few minority
languages which are more than superficially documented (e.g. Jruq, Katu, Phunoy,
Kmhmu, Karli) owe this distinction to the dedication and ingenuity of a few scholars
finding their way to remote field sites and carrying out their work. But it is notpractical difficulties which make research on minority languages difficult ~ thegreatest hurdle to such work is political resistance from the Lao authorities. The
potential cost of this resistance is the decline and fall, without a trace, of one of theworld's most linguistically and culturally diverse settings, whose lessons are of great
consequence not only in linguistics and anthropology, but in the social and cognitive
sciences generally. In order that the linguistic treasure trove hidden in the uplands of
Laos should not simply evaporate, Lao linguistics in the new century must tum fromits focus on just one of the country's languages, to thoroughly research the great
linguistic diversity of Laos.

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BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD

1933 - Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
BOONYAVONG, BOON THOM

1962 - English-Lao Dictionary. Vientiane, Laos: Lao-American Association.
BRADLEY, DAVID

2003 - "Language and Culture of Minority Groups". In Laos and Ethnic Minority
Cultures: Promoting Heritage, ed. Y. Goudineau, pp. 45-68. Paris: Unesco.
CALLAGHAN, MIKE

1999 - Learn Lao. A Simple Guide to Practical Spoken Lao for English-Speakers.
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CAPELL, ARTHUR

1979 - "Further Typological Studies in Southeast Asian Languages". In Nguyen Dang
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CHAPMAN, ADAM

1996 - The Syntax of Lao Expressives. Honour's Dissertation, Australian National
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