Kachinic

Kachinic, or Jingpoish, is a cluster of Tibeto-Burman languages in the Sal branch spoken across the Kachin Hills of northern Myanmar and adjoining Yunnan and northeastern India. Its best-known member is Jingpho, the lingua franca of the Kachin confederation and standard language of around sixteen varieties; another is Kado, also called Kadu, spoken in the Chindwin valley.

The Kadu were the dominant people of that valley in the early second millennium until Chin and then Shan migrants moved in. The Jingpho pushed south of the twenty-eighth parallel in recent centuries, one tradition dating their passage through Putao to the 1600s, as the Shan states weakened.

Through the early nineteenth century the languages remained unwritten, carried by oral tradition, and highland dealings with the lowlands went on in Shan or Burmese.