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The Hmong-Mien or Miao-Yao languages are a small language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Hubei provinces, where its speakers have been relegated to being "hill people," while the Han Chinese have settled the more fertile river valleys. Within the last 300–400 years, the Hmong and some Mien people have migrated to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. As a result of the Indochina Wars, many Hmong speakers left Southeast Asia for Australia, the United States, and other countries.

[edit] Relationships

Hmong (Miao) and Mien (Yao) are clearly distinct, but closely related. The relationship of the poorly known Ho Ne (Huo Nie) language of the Shē is obscure, though it may be closest to Mien. Part of the difficulty is that it has been strongly influenced by neighboring tongues. One proposed internal classification is listed below.

Earlier linguistic classifications placed the Hmong-Mien languages into the Sino-Tibetan language family, where they remain in many Chinese classifications, but the current consensus among Western linguists is that they constitute a family of their own. The family has its origins in southern or perhaps even central China. The current area of greatest agreement is that the languages appeared in the region between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but there is reason to believe that speakers migrated there from further north with the expansion of the Han Chinese.

Paul K. Benedict, an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Tai-Kadai family of Southeast Asia and the Hmong-Mien languages, together forming an Austro-Tai superfamily.

[edit] Names

The Mandarin names for these languages are Miáo and Yáo.

Meo, Hmu, Mong, and Hmong are local names for Miao, but since most Laotian refugees in the United States call themselves Hmong/Mong, this name has become better known in English than the others in recent decades. However, the name Hmong is not used in China, where the majority of the Miao live.

The Chinese name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality, which is a cultural rather than ethno-linguistic group. It includes peoples speaking the Mien, Kadai, Yi, and Miao languages. For this reason the ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous.

[edit] Characteristics

Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong-Mien languages tend to be monosyllabic and syntactically analytic. They are some of the most highly tonal languages in the world: Longmo and Zongdi Hmong have as many as twelve distinct tones^[1]. They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of voiceless sonorants and uvular consonants; otherwise their phonology is also quite typical of the region.

They are SVO in word order but are not as rigidly right-branching as the Tai-Kadai or most Mon-Khmer languages, since they have genitives and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in adpositions: serial verb constructions replace most functions of adpositions in languages like English. For example, a construction translating as "be near" would be used where in English we would use a word like "in" or "at"^[2]

Besides their tonality and lack of adpositions, another striking feature is the abundance of numeral classifiers and their use where other languages use definite articles or demonstratives to modify nouns.

[edit] Proposed internal classification

Ethnologue lists 35 Hmong-Mien languages, some of which are mutually intelligible.^[3] The following classification follows Matisoff 2001.

• Hmong (Miao) languages
  • ? 'Gelo'
  • Northern Hmong
    • Xiangxi Miao (Red Miao)
  • Western Hmong
    • Libo Miao
    • Weining Miao
    • Yi Miao
    • Hmong proper (includes Hmong Njua (Blue/Green Miao), Hmong Daw (White Miao), and Magpie Miao)
  • Central Hmong
    • Qiandong Miao (Black Miao)
    • Longli Miao
  • East Guizhou
  • Patengic
    • Pa-Hng
    • Yongcong

• Mien (Yao) languages
  • Iu Mien
  • Kim Mun
  • Ba Pai

In addition, the position of Ho Ne (Huo Nie) is obscure.

For an examination of alternate schemes such as the one by Strecker and one prepared for Miao by Chinese linguists, see Bryce Schroeder's Hmong page.

[edit] Further reading

• Paul K. Benedict (1942). "Thai, Kadai and Indonesian: a new alignment in south east Asia." American Anthropologist 44.576-601.
• Paul K. Benedict (1975). Austro-Thai language and culture, with a glossary of roots. New Haven: HRAF Press. ISBN 0875363237.
• Enwall, J. (1995). Hmong writing systems in Vietnam: a case study of Vietnam's minority language policy. Stockholm, Sweden: Center for Pacific Asian Studies.
• Enwall, J. (1994). A myth become reality: history and development of the Miao written language. Stockholm East Asian monographs, no. 5-6. [Stockholm?]: Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University. ISBN 171532692
• Lombard, S. J., & Purnell, H. C. (1968). Yao-English dictionary.
• Lyman, T. A. (1979). Grammar of Mong Njua (Green Miao): a descriptive linguistic study. [S.l.]: The author.
• Lyman, T. A. (1974). Dictionary of Mong Njua: a Miao (Meo) language of Southeast Asia. Janua linguarum, 123. The Hague: Mouton.
• Lyman, T. A. (1970). English/Meo pocket dictionary. Bangkok, Thailand: German Cultural Institute, Goethe-Institute.
• Purnell, H. C. (1965). Phonology of a Yao dialect spoken in the province of Chiengrai, Thailand. Hartford studies in linguistics, no. 15.
• Smalley, W. A., Vang, C. K., & Yang, G. Y. (1990). Mother of writing: the origin and development of a Hmong messianic script. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226762866
• Smith, P. (1995). Mien-English everyday language dictionary = Mienh in-wuonh dimv nzangc sou. Visalia, CA: [s.n.].

[edit] References