SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The northern Mon-Khmer language Wa is a group of dialects spoken by about a million people on the China-Burma border. The Dictionary of Wa documents the lexicon of a digitised corpus comprising the majority of extant printed resources in the two closely related de facto standard Wa dialects. Approximately 12,000 headwords and compounds are translated and explained in Burmese, Chinese and English, with some 7,000 example sentences, similarly translated. The dictionary is alphabetised in the Wa orthography officially adopted by the authorities in the Wa Special Region in Burma, a revised and improved version of the spelling first devised for translations of the Bible in the 1930s; headwords are given also in the spelling devised for Wa publications in China.