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The Iu Mien language ( ium, Iu Mienh, ; zh, 勉語 or ; th, ภาษาอิวเมี่ยน) is the language spoken by the Iu Mien people in China (where they are considered a constituent group of the
Yao people The Yao people (its majority branch is also known as Mien; ; vi, người Dao) is a government classification for various minorities in China and Vietnam. They are one of the 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities in China and reside in t ...
s), Laos,
Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...
,
Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...
and, more recently, the United States in diaspora. Like other Mien languages, it is tonal and
monosyllabic In linguistics, a monosyllable is a word or utterance of only one syllable. It is most commonly studied in the fields of phonology and morphology and it has no semantic content. The word has originated from the Greek language. "Yes", "no", "jump", ...
. Linguists in China consider the dialect spoken in Changdong,
Jinxiu Yao Autonomous County Jinxiu (; za, italic=yes, Ginhsiu) is a county of eastern Guangxi, China, located in an area of relatively high concentrations of the Yao people. It is administered as the Jinxiu Yao Autonomous County of Laibin City. Established in 1952, with the ...
, Guangxi to be the standard. This standard is also spoken by Iu Mien in the West, however, because most are refugees from Laos, their dialect incorporates influences from the Lao and Thai languages.Ethnologue report for language code:ium
/ref> Iu Mien has 78%
lexical similarity In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
with Kim Mun (Lanten), 70% with Biao-Jiao Mien, and 61% with Dzao Min.


Geographic distribution

In China, Iu Mien is spoken in the following counties (Mao 2004:302–303). There are 130,000 speakers in Hunan province (known as the ''Xiangnan'' 湘南 dialect), and 400,000 speakers in Guangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong, Guizhou, and Jiangxi provinces (known as the ''Guangdian'' 广滇 dialect). *'' Guangxi'': Yangshuo, Lingui, Guanyang, Ziyuan, Xing'an, Longsheng, Gongcheng, Yongfu, Luzhai, Lipu, Mengshen, Pingle, Jinxiu, Yishan, Rong'an, Rongshui, Luocheng, Huanjiang, Shanglin, Xincheng, Laibin, Baise, Napo, Lingyun, Tianlin, Cangwu, Hezhou, Fuchuan, Zhaoping, Fangcheng, Shangsi *''
Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...
'': Yingde, Lechang, Shixing, Qujiang, Renhua, Wengyuan, Ruyuan, Liannan, Lianshan, Yangshan, Yangchun *''
Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the C ...
'': Hekou, Jinping, Honghe, Mengla, Malipo, Maguan, Gangnan, Funing, Wenshan *''
Guizhou Guizhou (; formerly Kweichow) is a landlocked province in the southwest region of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Guiyang, in the center of the province. Guizhou borders the autonomous region of Guangxi to the ...
'': Rongjiang, Congjiang, Sandu, Danzhai, Leishan, Zhenfeng, Luodian *''
Jiangxi Jiangxi (; ; formerly romanized as Kiangsi or Chianghsi) is a landlocked province in the east of the People's Republic of China. Its major cities include Nanchang and Jiujiang. Spanning from the banks of the Yangtze river in the north int ...
'': Quannan, Shanggao *''
Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi ...
'': Jianghua, Yongzhou, Shuangpai, Xintian, Changning, Daoxian, Lanshan, Lingxian, Ningyuan, Jiangyong, Dong'an, Chenzhou, Zixing, Lingwu, Guiyang, Xinning, Yizhang, Chengbu, Qiyang, Chenxi; also in Longzha Township 龙渣瑶族乡, Yanling County


Dialects

There are several known dialects of Iu Mien. Dialects vary by clan and geographic location. In Vietnam,
Dao people The Yao people (its majority branch is also known as Mien; ; vi, người Dao) is a government classification for various minorities in China and Vietnam. They are one of the 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities in China and reside in ...
belonging to the Đại Bản, Tiểu Bản, Quần Chẹt, Ô Gang, Cóc Ngáng, and Cóc Mùn subgroups speak Iu Mien dialects.


Phonology


Consonants

There are 31 cited consonant
phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
in Iu Mien. A distinguishing feature of Iu Mien consonants is the presence of voiceless nasals and laterals. # The standard spelling system for Iu Mien does not represent the stop sounds in a way that corresponds to the IPA symbols, but instead uses e.g. , , and to represent . This may stem from an attempt to model the Iu Mien spelling system on
Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...
(used to represent
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
), where and represent . The Pinyin influence is also seen in the use of , , and to represent the alveolar affricates and , , and for the postalveolar affricates . The use of to represent the velar nasal means that it cannot also be used to represent , as would be predicted; instead, is used. # According to Aumann and Chengqian, in a certain Chinese dialect, the postalveolar affricates are instead
palatal stop In phonetics and phonology, a palatal stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the body of the tongue in contact with the hard palate (hence palatal), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consonant). Note that a sto ...
s (/cʰ/, /c/, /ɟ/). # According to Daniel Bruhn, the voiceless nasals are actually sequences (i.e. a short nasalized /h/ followed by a voiced nasal), while the voiceless lateral is actually a voiceless lateral fricative . # Bruhn also observed that younger-generation Iu Mien Americans were more likely to substitute the voiceless
nasals In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast majorit ...
and voiceless laterals with /h/ and the
alveolo-palatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (or alveopalatal) consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simultaneous alveolar and palatal artic ...
affricates with their corresponding palato-alveolar variants.


Onset

It appears that all single consonant phonemes except /ʔ/ can occur as the
onset Onset may refer to: *Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound *Onset, Massachusetts Onset is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Wareham, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 1,573 at the 2010 census. Geog ...
.


Coda

Unlike
Hmong Hmong may refer to: * Hmong people, an ethnic group living mainly in Southwest China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand * Hmong cuisine * Hmong customs and culture ** Hmong music ** Hmong textile art * Hmong language, a continuum of closely related to ...
, which generally prohibits coda consonants, Iu Mien has seven single consonant phonemes that can take the coda position. These consonants are /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, ̚ ̚ ̚ and /ʔ/. Some of the stops can only occur as final consonants when accompanied by certain tones; for example, /ʔ/ only occurs with the tone or .


Vowels

Iu Mien vowels are represented in the Iu Mien United Script using combinations of the six letters, , , , , , and . According to Bruhn, the
monophthongs A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...
are , , , , , , , , , and . The
diphthongs A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
are , , , , , , , . Furthermore, additional diphthongs and triphthongs can be formed from the aforementioned vowels through /i/- or /u/-on-gliding (having /i/ or /u/ before the vowel). Such vowels attested by Bruhn include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . The dialect studied by Bruhn, and described in the above table, has a phoneme that does not have its own spelling, but is represented in various contexts either as or (which are also used for /e/ and , respectively). In all cases where is spelled , and nearly all cases where it is spelled , it does not contrast with /e/ or , respectively, and can be viewed as an allophone of these sounds. The only potential exception appears to be when occurring as a syllable final by itself, where it has an extremely restricted distribution, occurring only after the (alveolo-)palatal consonants . The sound may be a secondary development from in this context, although Bruhn does not discuss this issue.


Tones

Iu Mien is a
tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
with six observed tonemes. In the Iu Mien United Script (the language's most common writing system), tones are not marked with diacritics; rather, a word's tone is indicated by a special marker letter at the end of the word. If a word lacks a marker, then it is to be pronounced with a middle tone.


Grammar

Iu Mien is an analytic language and lacks
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
. It is also a
monosyllabic language A monosyllabic language is a language in which words predominantly consist of a single syllable. An example of a monosyllabic language would be Old Chinese or Vietnamese or Burmese. Monosyllabism is the name for the property of single-syllable ...
, with most of its lexicon consisting of one syllable. The language follows a SVO word order. Some other syntactic properties include the following: *
Adjectives In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the mai ...
usually follow
nouns A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
. * Question words like those meaning 'where' generally come at the end of sentences. * The negative word (often shortened to ) may occur before verbs to negate them. * A prevalence of contractions. Some words consist of a contracted syllable followed by an uncontracted second syllable (in IMUS, these syllables are separated by apostrophes). One such example is ("spider"), a contraction of ("insect-spider").


Writing system

In the past, the lack of an
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
caused low rates of
literacy Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, hum ...
amongst the Iu Mien speakers. It had been written with
Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...
in China; however, this is extremely difficult for Iu Mien speakers from other countries such as Laos and from groups who now live in the West. In an effort to address this, an Iu Mien Unified Script was created in 1984 using the Latin script, based on an earlier orthography developed in China. Unlike the
Vietnamese language Vietnamese ( vi, tiếng Việt, links=no) is an Austroasiatic languages, Austroasiatic language originating from Vietnam where it is the national language, national and official language. Vietnamese is spoken natively by over 70 million people, ...
, this alphabet does not use any diacritics to distinguish tones or different vowel sounds, and only uses the 26 letters of the
ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...
. This orthography distinguishes 30 initials, 128 finals, and eight tones. Hyphens are used to link adjectives with the nouns they modify. The alphabet is similar to the RPA used to write the Hmong language and the Hanyu Pinyin transcription scheme used for Chinese.


IMUS spelling-to-sound correspondences


Films

The following films feature the Iu Mien language: *2003 –
Death of a Shaman
'. Directed by Richard Hall; produced by Fahm Fong Saeyang. *2010
"Siang-Caaux Mienh"
A story of a very irresponsible family man, alcoholic, and drug addict. He likes his bad friends but he doesn’t love his family. But as he starts paying his mistakes, has become a turning point in his life. *2011
"Mborqv Jaax Ciangv"
A moving family friendly movie.


Notes


References

* * * * * * * ; Dissertations * *


Further reading

* * * *


External links


An Online Blog By Iu Mien AmericansThe Iu-Mien Community OnlineMien Kingdom – Community ForumOLAC resources in and about the Iu Mien languageWorld Atlas of Language Structures entryLearnMien.com
{{Authority control Hmong–Mien languages Languages of China Languages of Vietnam Languages of Thailand Languages of Laos