हानी

Hani is a major Loloish Tibeto-Burman language of the Yunnan-Vietnam-Laos border region, with ~1.5 million speakers across the three countries. The Hani people are world-famous for their UNESCO World Heritage Site (2013) Honghe Hani Rice Terraces — a 1,300-year-old terraced rice cultivation system on the slopes of the Ailao Mountains in southern Yunnan, considered one of the most spectacular agricultural landscapes in the world. Linguistically, Hani has classical Loloish features: tonal (3 tones), classifier-noun constructions, and a rich vocabulary for terraced rice agriculture and mountain ecology. The Hani Pinyin orthography (1957) provides standardized literacy.