Hmong language

Hmong or Mong is a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmongic languages spoken by the Hmong people of Southwestern China, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. There are an estimated 4.5 million speakers of varieties that are largely mutually intelligible, including over 280,000 Hmong Americans as of 2013. Over half of all Hmong speakers speak the various dialects in China, where the Dananshan dialect forms the basis of the standard language. However, Hmong Daw and Mong Leng are widely known only in Laos and the United States; Dananshan is more widely known in the native region of Hmong.

Varieties

Mong Leng and Hmong Daw are part of a dialect cluster known in China as , called the "Chuanqiandian cluster" in English since West Hmongic is also called. The variety spoken from Sichuan in China to Thailand and Laos is referred to in China as the "First Local Variety" of the cluster. Mong Leng and Hmong Daw are just those varieties of the cluster that migrated to Laos. The names Mong Leng, Hmong Dleu/Der, and Hmong Daw are also used in China for various dialects of the cluster.
Ethnologue once distinguished only the Laotian varieties, Sinicized Miao, and the Vietnamese varieties. The Vietnamese varieties are very poorly known; population estimates are not even available. In 2007, Horned Miao, Small Flowery Miao, and the Chuanqiandian cluster of China were split off from Mong Leng .
These varieties are as follows, along with some alternative names.

Hmong/Mong/Chuanqiandian Miao macrolanguage, including:
* Hmong Daw,
* Mong Leng,
* Hmong Shua,
* Hmo or A-Hmo,
* Small Flowery Miao,
* and the rest of the Chuanqiandian Miao cluster located in China.
Hmong languages of Vietnam, not considered part of the China/Laos macrolanguage and possibly forming their own distinct macrolanguage — they are still not very well classified even if they are described by Ethnologue as having vigorous use but without population estimates; they have most probably been influenced by Vietnamese, as well as by French and later American English, and they may be confused with varieties spoken by minorities living today in the United States, Europe or elsewhere in Asia :
* Hmong Dô,
* Hmong Don.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated that the White and Leng dialects "are said to be mutually intelligible to a well-trained ear, with pronunciation and vocabulary differences analogous to the differences between British and American English."
Several Chinese varieties may overlap with or be more distinct than the varieties listed above:

Dananshan Miao, the basis of the Chinese standard of the Chuanqiandian cluster
Black Miao
Southern Hmong
Northern Hmong
Western Sichuan Miao

In the 2007 request to establish an ISO code for the Chuanqiandian cluster, corresponding to the "first local dialect" of the Chuanqiandian cluster in Chinese, the proposer made the following statement on mutual intelligibility:

Varieties in Laos

According to the CDC, "although there is no official preference for one dialect over the other, White Hmong seems to be favored in many ways": the Romanized Popular Alphabet most closely reflects that of White Hmong ; most educated Hmong speak White Hmong because White Hmong people lack the ability to understand Mong Leng; and most Hmong dictionaries only include the White Hmong dialect. Furthermore, younger generations of Hmong are more likely to speak White Hmong, and speakers of Mong Leng are more likely to understand White Hmong than speakers of White Hmong are to understand Mong Leng.

Varieties in the United States

Most Hmong in the United States speak White Hmong and Mong Leng, with around 60% speaking White Hmong and 40% Mong Leng. The CDC states that "though some Hmong report difficulty understanding speakers of a dialect not their own, for the most part, Mong Leng seem to do better when understanding both dialects."

Phonology

The three dialects described here are Hmong Daw, Mong Leeg, and Dananshan. Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg are the two major dialects spoken by Hmong Americans. Although mutually intelligible, the dialects differ in both lexicon and certain aspects of phonology. For instance, Mong Leeg lacks the voiceless/aspirated of Hmong Daw and has a third nasalized vowel, ; Dananshan has a couple of extra diphthongs in native words, numerous Chinese loans, and an eighth tone.

Vowels

The vowel systems of Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg are as shown in the following charts.

1st Row: IPA, Hmong RPA
2nd Row: Nyiakeng Puachue
3rd Row: Pahawh

The Dananshan standard of China is similar. Phonemic differences from Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg are color-coded and marked as absent or added.
Dananshan occurs only after non-palatal affricates, and is written, much like Mandarin Chinese. is pronounced after palatal consonants. There is also a triphthong , as well as other i- and u-initial sequences in Chinese borrowings, such as.

Consonants

Hmong makes a number of phonemic contrasts unfamiliar to English speakers. All non-glottal stops and affricates distinguish aspirated and unaspirated forms, and most also distinguish prenasalization independently of this. The consonant inventory of Hmong is shown in the chart below.

1st Row: IPA, Hmong RPA
2nd Row: Nyiakeng Puachue
3rd Row: Pahawh

The Dananshan standard of China is similar. Aspirates, voiceless fricatives, voiceless nasals, and glottal stop only occur with yin tones. Standard orthography is added in angled brackets. The glottal stop is not written; it is not distinct from a zero initial. There is also a, which occurs only in foreign words.
The status of the consonants described here as single phonemes with lateral release is controversial. A number of scholars instead analyze them as biphonemic clusters with as the second element. The difference in analysis is not based on any disagreement in the sound or pronunciation of the consonants in question, but on differing theoretical grounds. Those in favor of a unit-phoneme analysis generally argue for this based on distributional evidence and dialect evidence, whereas those in favor of a cluster analysis tend to argue on the basis of general phonetic principles.
Some linguists prefer to analyze the prenasalized consonants as clusters whose first element is. However, this cluster analysis is not as common as the above one involving.
Only used in Hmong RPA and not in Pahawh Hmong, since Hmong RPA uses Latin script and Pahawh Hmong does not. For example, in Hmong RPA, to write keeb, the order Consonant + Vowel + Tone must be followed, so it is k + ee + b = keeb, but in Pahawh Hmong, it is just Keeb "".

Syllable structure

Hmong syllables have simple structure: all syllables have an onset consonant, nuclei may consist of a monophthong or diphthong, and the only coda consonants that occur are nasals. In Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg, nasal codas have become nasalized vowels, though they may be accompanied by weakly articulated. Similarly, a short may accompany the low-falling creaky tone.
Dananshan has a syllabic in Chinese loans, such as lf 'two' and lx 'child'.

Tones

Hmong is a tonal language and makes use of seven or eight distinct tones.

Tone	Hmong Daw example	Hmong/Mong RPA spelling	Vietnamese Hmong spelling	Nyiakeng Puachue	Pahawh Hmong
High	'ball'	pob	poz
Mid	'spleen'	po	po
Low	'thorn'	pos	pos
High-falling	'female'	poj	pox
Mid-rising	'to throw'	pov	por
Low checked tone	'to see'	pom	pov
Mid-falling breathy tone	'grandmother'	pog	pol

The Dananshan tones are transcribed as pure tone. However, given how similar several of them are, it is likely that there are also phonational differences as in Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg. Tones 4 and 6, for example, are said to make tenuis plosives breathy voiced, suggesting they may be breathy/murmured like the Hmong g-tone. Tones 7 and 8 are used in early Chinese loans with entering tone, suggesting they may once have marked checked syllables.
Because voiceless consonants apart from tenuis plosives are restricted to appearing before certain tones, those are placed first in the table:

Tone	IPA	Orthography
1 high falling	43	b
3 top	5	d
5 high	4	t
7 mid	3	k
2 mid falling	31	x
4 low falling	21	l
6 low rising	13	s
8 mid rising	24	f

So much information is conveyed by the tones that it is possible to speak intelligibly using musical tunes only; there is a tradition of young lovers communicating covertly playing a Jew's harp to convey vowel sounds.

Orthography

Robert Cooper, an anthropologist, collected a Hmong folktale saying that the Hmong used to have a written language, and important information was written down in a treasured book. The folktale explains that cows and rats ate the book, so, in the words of Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, "no text was equal to the task of representing a culture as rich as that of the Hmong." Therefore, the folktale states that the Hmong language was exclusively oral from that point onwards.
Natalie Jill Smith, author of "Ethnicity, Reciprocity, Reputation and Punishment: An Ethnoexperimental Study of Cooperation among the Chaldeans and Hmong of Detroit ", wrote that the Qing Dynasty had caused a previous Hmong writing system to die out when it stated that the death penalty would be imposed on those who wrote it down.
Since the end of the 19th century, linguists created over two dozen Hmong writing systems, including systems using Chinese characters, the Lao alphabet, the Cyrillic script, the Thai alphabet, and the Vietnamese alphabet. In addition, in 1959 Shong Lue Yang, a Hmong spiritual leader from Laos, created an 81 symbol writing system called Pahawh. Yang was not previously literate in any language. Chao Fa, an anti-Laotian government Hmong group, uses this writing system.
In the 1980s, Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong script was created by a Hmong Minister, Reverend Chervang Kong Vang, to be able to capture Hmong vocabulary clearly and also to remedy redundancies in the language as well as address semantic confusions that was lacking in other scripts. Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong script was mainly used by United Christians Liberty Evangelical Church, a church also founded by Vang, although the script have been found to be in use in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, France, and Australia. The script bears strong resemblance to the Lao alphabet in structure and form and characters inspired from the Hebrew alphabets, although the characters themselves are different.
Other experiments by Hmong and non-Hmong orthographers have been undertaken using invented letters.
The Romanized Popular Alphabet, the most widely used script for Hmong Daw and Mong Leeg, was developed in Laos between 1951 and 1953 by three Western missionaries. In the United States Hmong do not use RPA for spelling of proper nouns, because they want their names to be easily pronounced by people unfamiliar with RPA. For instance Hmong in the U.S. spell Hmoob as "Hmong," and Liab Lis is spelled as Lia Lee.
The Dananshan standard in China is written in a pinyin-based alphabet, with tone letters similar to those used in RPA.