Taiz in this dictionary is a dialect spoken by Tày or former Thổ people residing in Bình Liêu, Lục Hồn, Hoành Mô Communes, Quảng Ninh City, Vietnam. There are about 20,000 speakers. This dialect is also called Tày Phén spoken by Phen people (偏人); and is mutually intelligible with other Tày dialects in Vietnam and some Zhuang dialects in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China.

How to read this dictionary

Each entry is a word in Tày, a Tai language of northern Vietnam, shown together with its equivalents in seven other languages.

The headword is written in the Taiz orthography (the Latin spelling with tone letters x, j, q, z used by the Speak Tai project for the Bình Liêu dialect), for example diip. The same word also appears in two other forms:

• Standard Tày (Chữ Tày Quốc Ngữ), the Vietnamese-style spelling — điếp
• IPA pronunciation — /ɗiəp˥/

The glosses translate the headword into seven languages. Where a language is written with Chinese-derived characters, the reading (pronunciation) is added in parentheses:

• English — plain translation (love)
• Vietnamese — modern Quốc Ngữ spelling (yêu)
• Thai — Thai script with romanization (รัก rák)
• Mandarin — simplified characters with Pinyin (爱 ài)
• Cantonese — traditional characters with Jyutping (愛 ngoi3)
• Japanese — kanji with kana and romaji (愛 あい ai)
• Korean — Hangul with hanja and Revised Romanization (사랑 愛 saranghada)

A note on each entry records the HSK level (the wordlist is keyed to the Chinese proficiency test), the Sino-Vietnamese (Hán Việt) reading where relevant, and the Zhuang cognate.