Bai language in the context of "Dali City"

The Chinese family of scripts includes writing systems used to write various East Asian languages, that ultimately descend from the oracle bone script invented in the Yellow River valley during the Shang dynasty. These include written Chinese itself, as well as adaptations of it for other languages, such as Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, Vietnamese chữ Hán and chữ Nôm, Zhuang sawndip, and Bai bowen. More divergent are the Tangut script, Khitan large script, Khitan small script and its offspring, the Jurchen script, as well as the Yi script, Sui script, and Geba syllabary, which were inspired by written Chinese but not descended directly from it. While written Chinese and many of its descendant scripts are logographic, others are phonetic, including the kana, Nüshu, and Lisu syllabaries, as well as the bopomofo semi-syllabary.

These scripts are written in various styles, principally seal script, clerical script, regular script, semi-cursive script, and cursive script. Adaptations range from the conservative, as in Korean, which used Chinese characters in their standard form with only a few local coinages, and relatively conservative Japanese, which has coined a few hundred new characters and used traditional character forms until the mid-20th century, to the extensive adaptations of Zhuang and Vietnamese, each coining over 10,000 new characters by Chinese formation principles, to the highly divergent Tangut script, which formed over 5,000 new characters by its own principles.

The Dali Kingdom, also known as the Dali State (traditional Chinese: 大理國; simplified Chinese: 大理国; pinyin: Dàlǐ Guó; Bai: Dablit Guaif), was a Bai dynastic state situated in modern Yunnan province, China, from 937 to 1253. In 1253, it was conquered by the Mongols. However, descendants of its ruling house continued to administer the area as tusi chiefs under Yuan dynasty rule until the Ming conquest of Yunnan in 1382. The former capital of the Dali Kingdom remains known as Dali in modern Yunnan Province today.

The Bai or Pai (Bai: Baipho [pɛ̰˦˨xo̰˦], 白和; Chinese: 白族; pinyin: Báizú) are an East Asian ethnic group native to the Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan Province, Bijie area of Guizhou Province, and Sangzhi area of Hunan Province. The Bai constitute one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by China, with a population of 2,091,543 (as of 2020).

In phonology, a register, or pitch register, is a prosodic feature of syllables in certain languages in which tone, vowel phonation, glottalization or similar features depend upon one another.

It occurs in Bai, Burmese, Vietnamese, Wu Chinese and Zulu.

The Macro-Bai or simply Bai languages (Chinese: 白语支) are a putative group of Sino-Tibetan languages proposed in 2010 by the linguist Zhengzhang, who argued that Bai and Caijia are sister languages. In contrast, Sagart argues that Caijia and the Waxiang language of northwestern Hunan constitute an early split off from Old Chinese. Additionally, Longjia and Luren are two extinct languages of western Guizhou closely related to Caijia.