page_title: Tai languages
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tai languages / History
caption_attribution_description: English: An example of Tai scripts. All are written, "Kind elephant rider." [Lit. person-ride-elephant-heart-good(good heart;kind).]
context_page_description: The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages, are a branch of the Kra–Dai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including Standard Thai or Siamese, the national language of Thailand; Lao or Laotian, the national language of Laos; Myanmar's Shan language; and Zhuang, a major language in the Southern Chinese province of Guangxi.
context_section_description: Citing the fact that both the Zhuang and Thai peoples have the same exonym for the Vietnamese, kɛɛuᴬ¹, Jerold A. Edmondson of the University of Texas at Arlington posited that the split between Zhuang (a Central Tai language) and the Southwestern Tai languages happened no earlier than the founding of Jiaozhi in Vietnam in 112 BCE but no later than the 5th-6th century AD. Based on layers of Chinese loanwords in Proto-Southwestern Tai and other historical evidence, Pittayawat Pittayaporn (2014) suggests that the dispersal of Southwestern Tai must have begun sometime between the 8th and 10th centuries AD.
caption: Tai alphabets. The phrase is kind elephant rider.
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