One way the Zhuang hold fast to their ethnic identity is through the preservation of their language. The Zhuang language remained unwritten until the 1950s when an alphabet based on the Roman alphabet was developed. Now, some Zhuang primary school children in Guangxi are receiving a bilingual education learning both Zhuang and Chinese.
The Zhuang language has two major dialects: Northern Zhuang and Southern Zhuang, and descends from the Thai language family. (Even though their languages are part of the same family, the Thai and the Zhuang cannot understand each another.) A 65% lexical similarity exists between Northern and Southern Zhuang; sources indicate that the two languages are similar in grammatical structure and vocabulary. Ten million people, including all sub-dialect speakers, speak Northern Zhuang; four million, including all sub-dialect speakers, speak Southern Zhuang. Some sources report that the Zhuang language has over 50 dialects, most Zhuang also speak Cantonese and Mandarin today.
![Meaning of [The friend is pulled to the unlucky affair]. The good luck and daytime are large good lucks in the misfortune and the evening in the morning. However, the funeral is abhorred.](http://www.irohaproject.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/koyomi/image/roku1.gif "Meaning of [The friend is pulled to the unlucky affair]. The good luck and daytime are large good lucks in the misfortune and the evening in the morning. However, the funeral is abhorred.")
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