The Bai language (Bai: ; ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai people. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tonal language with eight tones and a rather rich set of vowels. As is common among Southeast Asian languages, the vowels of Bai have a phonemic opposition between tense vowels and lax vowels (creaky voice vs. normal voice). There exists a small amount of traditional literature written with Chinese characters, Bowen , as well as a number of recent publications printed with a recently standardized system of romanisation using the Latin alphabet.