Zhuang of liujiang love poem
Meng yi le ging di fanxie,
Xi du gu zui meili di xipian,
Danxi ha ni wei jiu xiaoxi le,
Gien xi du gu zui hou di "gu ai meng".
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Zhuang of liujiang
Translation of my love poem in Zhuang liujiang dialect (North's Zhuang, Chuang). Zhuang Liujiang is one of the northern Zhuang varieties. They would therefore be a northern Tai language.
You should know that there are about twenty variants of the Zhuang language. This Tai-Kadai language is written here in Mandarin Pinyin. I don't dare transcribe it to you on my own in Chinese characters, my knowledge being very limited, it would be largely imperfect.
In any case, Zhuang, for all of its dialects, is the non-Chinese language, the most widely spoken in China. There are indeed 20 million speakers, and the Wuming dialect is the standard.
The one I present here, Zhuang Liujiang, count around 2 million speakers.
After the Han who are 90% Chinese, the Zhuangs represent the most important ethnic group in China.
The vast majority of them live in the west of Guangdong Province, in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Others live on the edge of Guangxi, in eastern Yunnan and other parts of Guangdong.
The Zhuang language is regularly used both outside and inside the family circle.
The Zhuangs have had their own writing system for 1500 years, which is common to all Zhuang languages.
Rice farmers and artisans, the Zhuangs live in houses on stilts.
Their traditional social organization is based on the exogamous and polygynous clan. Dominated by the culture of the ancestors, their religion is accompanied by practices of bewitchment and fertility rites.