Kachin Language

(Chingpaw, or Jinghpaw, language), the language of the Kachins, who live in the national states of Kachin and Shan in Burma and in the northwestern part of Yunnan Province in the People’s Republic of China. Kachin is related to the Tibeto-Burman group of Sino-Tibetan languages. There are about 500, 000 speakers of Kachin (1967, estimate), a language related to Burmese but differing from the latter in its numerous prefixes and well-developed system of suffixal forms of the predicate verb denoting the person and number of the subject and object. A script based on the Roman alphabet was created in the late 19th century.