A Linguistic Study of Lahu - Morphological and Syntactic Analysis -

The aim of this paper is to analyze and describe the morphological and syntactic structure of the Lahu language spoken in Chiang Rai area, Thailand. Lahu is one of the hill tribe languages spoken in Thailand, Myanmar, China and Laos, and has been classified as belonging to the Lolo-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Four Lahu speakers, two men and two women, speaking black Lahu, served as informants for this study in a series of field works conducted by the author in 1995-97. It was found necessary to set up seven parts of speech in Lahu, i.e. Noun, Verb, Particle, Classifier, Adverb, Conjunction and Interjection, on the basis of the syntactic function of words and morphemes. An Nominal and Verbal phrases and clauses are also found to operate as important syntactic units in the Lahu sentences, and three different types of sentences are distinguished on the basis of the syntactic complexity of the sentence structure, i.e., Simple, Compound and Complex. Finally it is interesting to note that Lahu and Korean are strikingly similar not only in sentence structure but also in phonetic and phonological systems despite the fact that they are taken to belong to two different language families