Ruc language
Rục is a Vietic language spoken by the Ruc people of Tuyên Hóa district, Quảng Bình province, Vietnam. Rục literally means 'underground spring', and is a critically endangered language spoken by a small ethnic group that practiced a hunter-gatherer lifestyle until the late 20th century.
History
Ruc speakers were hunter-gatherers until the late 1970s, when they were relocated into sedentary villages by the Vietnamese government. The 1985 Soviet-Vietnamese Linguistic Expedition found that there were no more than 200 Ruc people. Half of the Ruc died from a cholera epidemic in the late 1980s. Today, the Ruc live together with the Sach in villages close to the Laotian border. Ruc settlements include Yên Hợp and Phú Minh.Phonology
Unlike Vietnamese, Rục allows for presyllables with a minor vowel, such as cakuː4 'bear'. Rục is notable for preserving many prefixes that have been lost in Vietnamese, including prefixes in archaic Chinese loanwords that are crucial for the reconstruction of Old Chinese.Morphosyntax
Ruc is an isolating language with no inflection used in verbs and nouns at all, and a general drift towards analytic grammar is evident. In terms of derivational morphology, Ruc retains several forms of affixations that have been lost in other Vietic languages like Vietnamese, but their semantics are largely eroded. The transformation of archaic Vietic morphosyntax like Ruc from an Austroasiatic inflectional form to a newer analytical one is currently happening irreversibly and accelerating, with some Vietic languages having already finished the process.Under intense interactions with speakers of other more analytic languages such as Vietnamese and Lao, in the future, Ruc's older form of morphology may have been lost and replaced with a new one as seen in many Mainland Southeast Asian languages with affixes being less syntactically functional or no longer used.
Case
There are few recognizable grammatical cases in Ruc and they only utilize prefixes. The dative prefix pa- of Ruc has been cited by some linguists as supporting evidence for the Austric languages hypothesis.| Case | Marker | Example | Function |
| Dative | pa- | mi31 ‘you’ pami31 ‘ you’ | indirect object |
| Locative | a- | chu:4pa1 ‘we’ achu:pa ‘ us’ | mark on pronouns |
| Nominative | ʔa- | ʔaj1 ‘who’ ʔaʔaj1 ‘as for/on one/whom’ | mark on interrogative pronouns |
Syntax
Like other Vietic languages, Ruc has all similar characteristics: SVO structure, word order, noun phrase structure, topic-comment, uses of particles, auxiliary verbs, markers, classifiers, numbers, and modifiers. However, Ruc grammar will slightly differ with Vietnamese in cases of Ruc verbs that causative affixes are used.Morphology
In word formation, Ruc and archaic Vietic languages can employ three strategies: compounding, reduplication, and derivational affixation, though Vietic affixation in general is nonproductive and much of it appears fossilized.Compounding
Ruc compounding is similar to those seen in other Austroasiatic languages:Noun-Verb: ɲa:2 + ɉo:n1 → ɲa:2 ɉo:n1 ‘house on stilts’
Verb-Noun: pɨə2 + kudəl1 → pɨə2 kudəl1 ‘to be satisfied’
Verb-Verb: ti2 + luh1 → ti2 luh1 ‘to exit’
Verb-Verb/Adjective: khik3 + kitəɲ3 → khik3 kitəɲ3 ‘robust’
Approx. 16% of Ruc words are compounds while 84% are simple words according to a 1996 analysed corpus data.
Reduplication
Like other Vietic languages, reduplication in Ruc can be either full reduplication or segment alternation. For examples,pu35 → pu35pu35
lɛɲ1 → lɛɲ1 lɤaw4
kərßeːŋ → kərßeːŋ1 kərßiːt2
Derivational affixation
Affixation in Ruc creates lexicalized forms of words utilizing prefixes and infixes, while suffixes are almost lacking.The causative prefix pa- and infix -a- turn an intransitive verb into a transitive verb. For examples,
kun4 → pakun4
kɯcit3 → kacit3
The causative resultative prefix pa- is a homonym:
rɨmɛk3 → parɨmɛk3
The normalizing infixes -n- and -r- make a noun from a verb:
tʰut → tanut3
sɘp3 → sanɘp3
The quantifying prefix mu- turns numerals into measuring units.
hal1 → muhal1
Ruc has historical traces of a stative prefix on a number of adjectives but their word roots have largely eroded, leaving disyllabic adjectives with unanalyzable prefixes.