Vaiphei language

Vaiphei is a Sino-Tibetan language belonging to the Zo-Mizo linguistic subbranch of the Tibeto-Burman group of languages. It is spoken mainly in the Indian state of Manipur and minutely in Mizoram, Assam, Meghalaya, and Tripura. The dialect spoken in Manipur exhibits a least partial mutual intelligibility with the other Zo-Mizo dialects of the area including Thadou, Hmar, Paite, Simte, Mizo and Gangte languages.

Geographical distribution

Vaiphei is spoken in more than 30 villages of Lamka District, Southern Manipur. There are also speakers in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura.

Orthography

There is no official single spelling system, but many use the orthography of Mizo. Some writers use the circumflex ⟨ˆ⟩, but its meaning is inconsistent. is represented by ⟨o⟩ in open syllables and ⟨aw⟩ in closed syllables in the orthography. The glottal stop is represented by the letter ⟨h⟩.

Phonology

Consonants

Vaiphei has the following consonants, with the first symbol being its orthographical form and the second one its representation in the IPA:
are heard as unreleased in word-final position. The aspirated and voiced stops are restricted to syllable-initial position.
The glottal stop occurs only in syllable-final position, always occurs with low tone, and can be deleted.
The fricatives and the affricate do not occur word-finally.
The voiceless plosives, nasals, and laterals can all be the first members in a vowel sequence, and all phonemes except the glottal stop can be the second. Consonant clusters can be found in some loanwords, e.g., . can all form geminates, e.g., .

Vowels

Monophthongs

Vaiphei has five phonemic monophthongs.

	Front	Back
Close	⟨i⟩	⟨u⟩
Mid	⟨e⟩	⟨o/aw⟩
Open		⟨a⟩

tends to be realized as word-finally.

Diphthongs

Vaiphei has eight diphthongs,. These can all occur in word-medially and word-finally, but cannot occur word-initially.

Tone

Vaiphei is a tonal language with three contrastive tones, two contour tones and a low tone. Suantak uses numerals, where 1 is lowest and 5 is highest, and provides Chao tone letters.

Tone	Chao tone letter	IPA	gloss
Low
Rising
Falling

All three tones can occur on any vowel. All tones can occur with though the rising and falling tones do not co-occur with the glottal stop.
Tone sandhi occurs in compound words; for example, a low tone becomes a rising tone when preceded by a rising tone.

Syllable structure

The syllable structure in Vaiphei is V. The maximal syllable is CVC.

Syllable	IPA	Gloss
V
VC
CV
CVC