Bai

Bai is the language of the Erhai Lake region of Yunnan, centred on Dali, spoken by the people known to Chinese records as the Baiman or, from the fourteenth century, the Minjia.

Two millennia of intensive contact with Chinese have left its origins disputed: some linguists take it for an early offshoot that diverged from Chinese around the second century BCE, others for a sister language or a member of the Lolo-Burmese group.

The Bai were among the founders of the Nanzhao kingdom and in 937 established their own Dali kingdom, which ruled Yunnan until the Mongol conquest of 1253. Using adapted Chinese characters called Bowen, they wrote scriptures and literature in their own tongue, though the script was never standardized and Classical Chinese remained the language of the official examinations under the Ming.