Laha Erotic

The Laha are a small upland people of northwestern Vietnam, about ten thousand strong. What sets them apart is not what you see but the language they speak. A Laha village in Sơn La province can look almost exactly like the Black Tai settlements around it: stilt houses, rice paddies in the valley bottoms, women in fitted blouses and long dark skirts. The difference shows when people talk to each other at home. Laha belongs to the Kra branch of the Kra-Dai family. That makes it a distant cousin of the Tai languages spoken all around it, but so far removed that a Tai speaker cannot follow it. Its relatives within Kra are other small languages, such as Gelao, Lachi and Qabiao, found in pockets across northern Vietnam and southern China.

That close resemblance to the Tai is the story of the Laha. For centuries they lived under the Tai principalities of the Black River country, where non-Tai hill peoples were grouped together under the label Xá. One of their older outside names, Xá Khao, comes from that system. Over generations the Laha took up Tai dress, house building and farming methods, and many Laha speak Tai fluently. Vietnamese has spread through schooling. The Laha language is now considered endangered. Linguists recognize two main divisions, usually called Wet Laha and Dry Laha, and they often study the two separately.

For most of their history the Laha lived by farming. They were swidden cultivators: they cleared and burned hillside plots for upland rice and moved their fields when the soil wore out. Many households later moved to permanent paddy fields, first under Tai influence and then under Vietnamese state programs. Religion happens mostly at home, though it has a village side too. Families honor their ancestors at a household altar, and people take seriously the spirits of the house, the village, the fields and the forest. Ritual specialists are called in for illness, for the harvest and for the big turning points in a person's life. Marriage traditionally included a period of bride service, when the new husband lived and worked in his wife's parents' household before the couple set up their own home.

The Laha are one of Vietnam's 54 officially recognized ethnic groups. That gives them a line in the census and a place in state cultural programs. On its own, though, it does little to keep a small language alive in a region where Tai and Vietnamese are the languages of the market, the school and the phone screen.