Mizo language


Mizo also known as Duhlián ṭawng is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Mizoram, where it is the official language and lingua franca. It is the mother tongue of the Mizo people and some members of the Mizo diaspora. Other than Mizoram, it is also spoken in Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, and Assam states of India, Sagaing Region and Chin State in Myanmar, and Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. It is mainly based on the Lusei dialect but it has also derived many words from its surrounding Mizo clans such as Hmar, Pawi, etc.
The language is also known as Duhlian and Lushai, a colonial term, as the Duhlian people were the first among the Mizo people to be encountered by the British in the course of their colonial expansion.

Classification

Mizo is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Most linguist scholars classify Mizo as a part of the Central Kuki-Chin languages. In Mizo, the Kuki-Chin languages are recognised as Zohnahthlâk ṭawngho/Mizo ṭawngho. Within the central Kuki-Chin group, VanBik places it in the North Central group with other neighbouring languages such as Laiholh and Maraic. Other scholars, such as Schafer, classified it in the Kukish section of Burmese. Paul K. Benedict classified it under Central-Kuki under the Kuki-Chin-Naga branch.

Phonology

Vowels

Monophthongs

Mizo has eight tones and intonations for each of the vowels a, aw, e, i and u, four of which are reduced tones and the other four long tones. The vowel o has only three tones, all of them of the reduced type. The vowels can be represented as follows:

Diphthongs

Triphthongs

Mizo has the following triphthongs:
  • iai, as in iai, piai
  • iau as in riau ruau, tiau tuau etc.
  • uai, as in uai, zuai, tuai, vuai
  • uau, as in riau ruau, tiau tuau, suau s'uau'''''

    Consonants

Mizo has the following consonants, with the first symbol being its orthographical form and the second one its representation in the IPA:
  1. The glottal and glottalised consonants appear only in final position.

    Tone

Because differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words, Mizo is a tonal language.
The eight tones and intonations that the vowel a can have are shown by the letter sequence p-'a-n'-g, as follows:
  • long high tone: páng
  • long low tone: pàng
  • peaking tone: pâng
  • dipping tone: päng
  • short rising tone: pǎng
  • short falling tone: pȧng
  • short mid tone: pang
  • short low tone: pạng
Note that the exact orthography of tones with diacritics is still not standardised except for the differentiation of long tones by using the circumflex from short tones. As well, the need of at least seven diacritics may cause complications to design easy keyboard layouts, even if they use dead keys and even if not all basic Latin letters are needed for Mizo itself, and so publications may represent the short tones using digrams to reduce the number of diacritics needed to only four on only two dead keys.

Grammar

Verbs

Conjugation

In Mizo verb tense is indicated by the aspect and the addition of particles, such as:
  • ang,
  • tawh,
  • mék,
  • dáwn,
  • dáwn mék,

    Modification of verbs

Mizo gerunds and past participles are formed by a change in word ending called tihdanglamna; the resulting modified forms are called stem II in English-speaking linguistics literature.
verbmodified form

Nouns

Mizo nouns undergo declension into cases.
nominative/accusativegenitiveergativeinstrumental

Nouns are pluralised by suffixing -te, -ho, -teho or -hote.
singularplural

Pronouns

All Mizo pronouns occur in two forms, namely in free form and clitic form and are declined into cases.
nominativegenitiveaccusativeergative
clitic forms
clitic forms
clitic forms
clitic forms
clitic forms
clitic forms
free forms
free forms
free forms
free forms
free forms
free forms

Negation

For declarative sentences, negation is achieved by adding the particle lo at the end of a sentence:
SentenceNegation
Lala a lo kal
Lala is coming/''Lala came		Lala a lo kal lo
Lala did not come
Pathumin paruk a sem thei
Three divides six		Pathumin paruk a sem thei lo
Three does not divide six''

Cardinal numbers

Writing system

The Mizo alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet and has 25 letters. A written script for Lushai was created in 1874 by Thomas Herbert Lwein.
Letteraawbchdefgnghijk
Name

Letterlmnoprstṭuvz
Name

In its current form, it was devised by the first Christian missionaries of Mizoram, J. H. Lorrain and F. W. Savidge, based on the Hunterian system of transliteration.
A circumflex ^ was later added to the vowels to indicate long vowels, viz., Â, Ê, Î, Ô, Û, which were insufficient to fully express Mizo tone. Recently, a leading newspaper in Mizoram, Vanglaini, the magazine Kristian Ṭhalai, and other publishers began using Á, À, Ä, É, È, Ë, Í, Ì, Ï, Ó, Ò, Ö, Ú, Ù, Ü to indicate the long intonations and tones. However, this does not differentiate the different intonations that short tones can have.

Sample texts

The following is a sample text in Mizo of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Literature

Mizo has a thriving literature, which has both written and oral traditions.
It has undergone a considerable change in the 20th century.
The Mizoram Press Information Bureau lists some twenty Mizo daily newspapers just in Aizawl city, as of March 2013.