Wa language

Wa (Va) is the language of the Wa people of Burma and China. There are three distinct varieties, sometimes considered separate languages; their names in Ethnologue are Parauk, the majority and standard form; Vo (Zhenkang Wa, 40,000 speakers), and Awa (100,000 speakers), though all may be called Wa, Awa, Va, Vo. David Bradley (1994) estimates there are total of 820,000 Wa speakers.

Distribution and variants

Gerard Diffloth refers to the Wa geographic region as the "Wa corridor", which lies between the Salween and Mekong Rivers. According to Diffloth, variants include South Wa, "Bible Wa", and Kawa (Chinese Wa).

Christian Wa are more likely to support the use of Standard Wa, since their Bible is based on a standard version of Wa, which is in turn based on the variant spoken in Bang Wai, 150 miles north of Kengtung (Watkins 2002). Bang Wai is located in northern Shan State, Burma, close to the Chinese border where Cangyuan County is located.

Certain dialects of Wa preserve a final -/s/. They include the variants spoken in Meung Yang and Ximeng County (such as a variety spoken in Zhongke 中课, Masan 马散, Ximeng County that was documented by Zhou & Yan (1984)) (Watkins 2002:8).

VO language

In linguistics, a VO language is a language in which the verb typically comes before the object. VO languages compose approximately fifty-three percent of documented languages.

For example, Japanese would be considered an OV language whereas English would be considered to be VO. A basic sentence demonstrating this would be as follows.

Winfred P. Lehmann first proposed to reduce the six possible permutations of word order to just two main ones, VO and OV, in what he calls the Fundamental Principle of Placement (FPP), arguing that the subject is not a primary element of a sentence. VO languages are primarily right-branching, or head-initial; that is, heads are generally found at the beginning of their phrases. VO languages, as opposed to OV languages, have a tendency to favor the use of prepositions instead of postpositions with only 42 using postpositions of the documented 498 VO languages.

Some languages, such as Finnish, Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish, use both VO and OV constructions, though in other instances, such as Early Middle English, some dialects may use VO and others OV. Languages that contain both OV and VO construction may solidify into one or the other construction. A language that moves the verb or verb phrase more than the object will have surface VO word order, whereas a language that moves the object more than the verb or verb phrase will have surface OV word order.