2020-1

【Abstract】

Abstract

Over two decades ago, Jerold Edmondson and Li Jinfang conducted linguistic fieldwork in the China–Vietnam borderlands, and posited the existence of a migration corridor running between Guizhou province and the northern provinces of Vietnam, passing through the eastern part of Yunnan. This hypothesis was based on linguistic evidence, so they called it the language corridor, and looked at the correspondences between the speech of isolated communities in northern Vietnam and speech varieties in Guizhou, Guangxi and Yunnan. Historic migrations of populations, large and small, bring with them other traces of their original homelands. In the case of the Tai-speaking peoples of the China–Vietnam area, the evidence includes local varieties of vernacular character scripts based on Chinese. This article will present new information based on survey evidence, and propose a new enhancement of established methods in historical anthropology and historical linguistics.