Thao (Thao: Thau a lalawa), also known as Sao, is the nearly extinct language of the Thao people, an indigenous people of Taiwan from the Sun Moon Lake region in central Taiwan. It is a Formosan language of the Austronesian family; Barawbaw and Shtafari are dialects.

Name

The name Thao literally means "person", from Proto-Austronesian *Cau. It is therefore cognate with the name of the Tsou.

History

Speaking Thao was criminalised under Japanese rule of Taiwan and later the Kuomintang regime, contributing to its critically endangered status today. A Thao-English dictionary by Robert A. Blust was published in 2003 by Academia Sinica's Institute of Linguistics. In 2014, there were four L1 speakers and a fluent L2 speaker living in Ita Thaw (伊達邵) village (traditionally called Barawbaw), all but one of whom were over the age of sixty. Two elderly native speakers died in December of that year, including chief Tarma (袁明智), age 75. Four elderly L1 speakers and some semi-speakers were reported in 2021.

Phonology

Consonants

Orthographic notes: Notes:

Vowels

Notes:

Morphology

Thao has two or arguably three patterns of reduplication: Ca-reduplication, full reduplication, and rightward reduplication (which is sometimes considered to be a form of full reduplication). Thao verbs have the following types of focus (Blust 2003:239).

Syntax

Thao word order can be both SVO and VSO, although the former is derived from Taiwanese Hokkien (Blust 2003:228). The Thao personal marker is "ti" (Blust 2003:228). Negatives include "ani" and "antu"; "ata tu" is used in "don't" constructions. The perfect is marked by "iza", the past by an infix just after the primary onset consonant "-in-" and the future by the prefix "a-". Imperatives are marked by "-í" and softer imperatives or requests roughly translated as "please" by "-uan" sometimes spelled "-wan" which can co-occur with "-í".

Pronouns

The Thao personal pronouns below are from Blust (2003:207). Note that there is only 1 form each for "we (exclusive)," "you (plural)" and "they." Other pronouns include:

Affixes

The following affixes are sourced from Blust (2003:92-188) and adjusted to the modern spelling.