This paper considers the history of words for domesticated poultry, including ‘chicken’,
‘goose’, and ‘duck’, in China and mainland Southeast Asia to try to relate associated
domestication events with specific language groups. Linguistic, archaeological and historical
evidence supports Sinitic as one linguistic source, but in other cases, Tai and Austroasiatic
form additional centers of lexical forms which were borrowed by neighboring phyla. It is
hypothesized that these geographic regions of etyma for domesticated birds may represent
instances of bird domestication, or possibly advances in bird husbandry, by speech communities
in the region in the Neolithic Era, followed by spread of both words and cultural practices
