Palaungic

Palaungic, or Palaung-Wa, is a group of nearly thirty Austroasiatic languages, among them Wa, Blang, Lawa and Palaung, also called De'ang. They are spoken in scattered mountain pockets across the borderlands of Myanmar, Yunnan, Laos and Thailand, centred on the hills between the Salween and the Mekong known as the Wa corridor.

Their speakers are swidden-farming highlanders; around 1229 the Wa were driven out of Kengtung and were later defeated by King Mangrai of Lan Na as Tai-speaking principalities expanded.

None of these languages had a script of its own, and literate speakers wrote in Chinese characters or in Shan with the Shan script. In the early nineteenth century Palaungic speech survived chiefly in remote highland valleys ringed by Tai and Burmese states.