Akha is the language spoken by the Akha people of southern China (Yunnan Province), eastern Burma (Shan State), northern Laos, and northern Thailand.
Western scholars group Akha, Hani and Honi into the Hani languages, treating all three as separate mutually unintelligible, but closely related, languages.
Chinese linguists, however, consider all Hani languages, including Akha, to be dialects of a single language in accordance with China's official classification of ethnic groups, which groups all speakers of Hani languages into one ethnicity.
In China it is written as Aka 阿卡, in the Puer area of Yunnan.
