Zhuang is the name given to two Tai languages spoken in southern China and Vietnam. The two languages are Northern Zhuang and Southern Zhuang. The Chinese government recognises the Northern language as standard Zhuang and it is taught in schools alongside Mandarin.
It had been written with ideographs called old Zhuang characters, that are the Han characters adopted to this language, and original characters made out by using the similar manner of construction, for more than a thousand years. It was alphabetised into the latin alphabet with some cyrillic alphabets in the 1950s and then into the full latin alphabet in 1986.
Northern Zhuang is a tone language. It has six tones in open syllables and two, or three, in closed syllables.
Zhuang has 18,000,000 speakers.
Numbers in Northern Zhuang
See also: Zhuang people, Languages of China