Kam-English Dictionary (Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series)

The Kam, one of China's 55 official minorities, reside in Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi provinces in southern China. In the 1940s, Fang-kuei Li sparked an interest in the Kam language when he suggested that the Kam, Sui, and Mak languages of southern China formed a single related group and that this group bore a genetic relationship to the Tai languages. Following a number of scholarly articles, the Chinese Academy of Sciences then made one of the earliest in-depth treatments of Kam in 1959 with a dictionary that consisted of more than 8600 entries of Kam words, phrases, and idioms as well as Kam borrowings from Mandarin. This volume is an edited version of that dictionary. Because scholarly work has focused primarily on the native language, this version includes only the native Kam words in phonetic transcription with the Mandarin borrowings eliminated.