The Northern language group is tonal and includes 12 languages: Caac, Cemuhî, Fwâi, Jawe, Kumak, Nemi, Paicî, Pije, Pwaamei, Pwapwa, Yalayu, and Yuaga.
Other Indo-European sources have included Russian (for the northern languages) and Spanish (for the Apachean languages).
The Northern languages (Mandarin dialects) are more similar to each other than are the Southern (Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, Min).
Second, the other languages to which Athabaskan is related, Eyak and Tlingit, are also northern languages; they are spoken around the mouth of the Copper River in Alaska and the Alaska panhandle, respectively.
Amin was a considerable linguist, and once explained to me that he was much more fluent in his own Kakwa or its two related northern languages, than in English, which he had mastered only after joining the army.
Therefore, the starting point must be a comparison of the modern Sinitic languages, with the view of recovering for each major language group the original common form, such as Proto-Mandarin for the Northern languages and Proto-Wu and others for the languages south of the Yangtze River.
Northern languages, by contrast, become oriented to more practical tasks and are better for practical and theoretical reasoning.
This may be consistent with the facts, because after the Wei and Jin Dynasties, it was the 16 states splittingperiod during which the peoples speaking Northern languages began to infiltrate into the Central Plains, which was also a time of significant contact and mixture between the Han and non-Han peoples.
In terms of ethnicity, a high proportion of those sampled identified themselves as either Akan or of the Northern languages, followed by the Ewe or Ga Dangbe ethnicity.
Other theoretically relevant socio-demographic variables include marital status (never married, currently married, formerly married), age of respondent, religious affiliation (Christians, Muslims, Traditionalists, and no religion), ethnicity (Akan, Ga Dangbe, Ewe, Northern languages and other), urban or rural residence, and finally region of residence (Southern Ghana or Northern Ghana).
This is followed, to the south, by the Fuzhou, or Northern Min, language of northern and central Fujian and by the Xiamen-Shantou (Amoy-Swatow), or Southern Min, language of southern Fujian and easternmost Guangdong.
