The Pacoh language is a member of the Katuic language group, a part of the Eastern Mon–Khmer linguistic branch. Most Pacoh speakers live in central Laos and central Vietnam. Pacoh is undergoing substantial change, influenced by the Vietnamese.

Alternative names are Paco, Pokoh, Bo River Van Kieu. Its dialects are Pahi (Ba-Hi). They are officially classified by the Vietnamese government as Ta'Oi (Tà Ôi) people.

Phonology

Consonants

• Only /ɲ/, but not other nasals, occurs in presyllables before /c, ʃ, ɲ/.

• /w/ may be lenited as voiced dental fricative [v] in initial positions.

• Syllable finals /ŋ/ and /k/ are realized as labialized [ŋʷ], [kʷ] after [-RTR] back round vowels /o/ and /u/.

Vowels

Vowels (Sidwell 2003):

Pacoh has six vowel qualities, all of which occur long and short, in modal and creaky voice. Creaky vowels are lowered compared to modally voiced vowels. There are three diphthongs which also occur modal and creaky. Unlike other languages in the area, vowel phonation does not seem to have originated in the phonation of preceding consonants.

Grammar

Pacoh is an analytic SVO language with six parts of speech—including verbs, nouns, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, and sentence particles, all variably depend on each other in syntactic relationship, and five important grammatical cases—nominative, accusative, dative, locative, predicative. There are no markers for the nominative and accusative cases, and word order is relied on to distinguish them instead.

The predicative case marks a noun dependent on noun, usually common nouns, extension relator nouns, and demonstrative nouns.

References

Further reading

External links

• Alves, Mark J. 2007. Pacoh Pronouns and Grammaticalization Clines.

• A grammar of Pacoh: A Mon–Khmer language of the central highlands of Vietnam

• The language has these sounds

• Pacoh-English-Vietnamese dictionary by SIL International