Tai Dam
Spoken in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, China
Total speakers about 700,000
Language family Kradai

• Tai
  • Southwestern
    • East Central
      • Chiang Saeng
        • Tai Dam

Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 tai
ISO 639-3 blt
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Tai Dam is a Tai language spoken by the Tai Dam in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and China (mostly in the Jinping Miao, Yao, and Dai Autonomous County). It is called pʰaːsaː tʰai dam ภาษาไทดำ ("Black Tai") in Thai and Dǎidānyǔ 傣担语 in Chinese.

Tai Dam speakers in China are classified as part of the Dai nationality along with almost all the other Tai peoples. But in Vietnam they are given their own nationality (with the White Tai) where they are classified (confusingly for English speakers) as the Thái nationality (meaning Tai people).

Unique writing

An effort is underway to standardize the script in Unicode:

• At the Workshop on Encoding and Digitizing the Thai Script, held on November 3, 2006 in Điện Biên Phủ, Việt Nam, it has been proposed that the name of the script be called Tay, to indicate the Tai language as spoken in Việt Nam.

• At a Unicode subcommittee meeting on February 6, 2007, a proposal on the Tay Viet script was submitted by James Brase of SIL International.

• At the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 meeting on 2007-04-24, a revised proposal for the script, now known as Tai Viet, was accepted "as is", with support from TCVN, the Vietnam Quality & Standards Centre.

• What will follow is balloting within the ISO/IEC membership to finally adopt Tai Viet into ISO/IEC 10646, in parallel with acceptance into Unicode.

External links

• Tai Dam at Ethnologue
• Tai Dam alphabet
• Tai Dam Language, Literature, and Culture
• SIL Tai Dam fonts

Writing systems
Overview
Lists
Types