The Phonological System of Kri Phoong in Vietnam and an Extensive Glossary

Abstract

The Kri Phoong language (also known as Kha Phong, Coi, and Kri) is a minority language belonging to the Vietic group within the Austroasiatic language family. Kri Phoong is distributed in Vietnam and Laos, where it is simply called Kri. From a synchronic perspective, Kri in Laos has been described quite thoroughly in the phonological description and sketch grammar of Kri, a Vietic language of Laos (Enfield and Diffloth 2009), but the Kri Phoong language in Vietnam has not been described. This article will present its phonetic-phonological system and introduce 1,000 lexical items of Kri Phoong in Vietnam. The results of our research show that Kri Phoong in Vietnam is a sesquisyllabic, tonal language. The presence of tones is the most noteworthy difference between the Kri Phoong language in Vietnam and the Kri language in Laos, which lacks tones.