Lutuv, widely known as Lautu Chin, is a
Kuki-Chin language
The Kuki-Chin languages (also called Kuki-Chin-Mizo, Kukish or South-Central Tibeto-Burman languages) are a branch of 50 or so Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in northeastern India, western Myanmar and southeastern Bangladesh. Most speakers of the ...
spoken in 16 villages in
Matupi townships,
Thantlang
Thantlang (, ; also Thlantlang or Htantlang in Burmese transliteration) is a town and the administrative center of Thantlang Township in Chin State, western Myanmar (formerly Burma).
Names
Thantlang was formerly known as Thlan Tlang ("Cemete ...
townships and
Hakha townships,
Chin State
Chin State (, ) is a state in western Myanmar. The Chin State is bordered by Sagaing Division and Magway Division to the east, Rakhine State to the south, Bangladesh to the south-west, and the Indian states of Mizoram to the west and Ma ...
,
Myanmar
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John Wells explai ...
. The Lautu Chin dialects share 90%–97%
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. ...
.
Lautu Chin has 87%–94% lexical similarity with
Mara Chin, 82%–85% with
Zophe Chin, 80%–86% with
Senthang Chin.
The
Chin Languages Research Project with Lutuv translator Sui Hnem Par have provided translations of ten short books into Lutuv.
Distribution
Lutuv is spoken in the following villages: Hnaring, Khuahrang, Thang-aw, Fanthen (Aasaw), Surngen, Tisen, Sentung, Hriangpi (Hrepuv), Sate, Lekang, Lawngthangtlang, Zuamang, Capaw, Pintia, La-u, and Lei Pi (Li Puv).
References
Kuki-Chin languages
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