The Hmong–Mien languages (also known as Miao–Yao and rarely as Yangtzean) are a highly tonal

language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...

of southern China and northern

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...

. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including

Guizhou ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = , image_map = Guizhou in China (+all claims hatched).svg , mapsize = 275px , map_alt = Map showing the location of Guizhou Province , map_caption = Map s ...

Hunan Hunan is an inland Provinces of China, province in Central China. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the Administrative divisions of China, province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to the east, Gu ...

Yunnan Yunnan; is an inland Provinces of China, province in Southwestern China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 47.2 million (as of 2020). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the Chinese provinces ...

Sichuan Sichuan is a province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capital city is Cheng ...

Guangxi Guangxi,; officially the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is an Autonomous regions of China, autonomous region of the China, People's Republic of China, located in South China and bordering Vietnam (Hà Giang Province, Hà Giang, Cao Bằn ...

Guangdong ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

and

Hubei Hubei is a province of China, province in Central China. It has the List of Chinese provincial-level divisions by GDP, seventh-largest economy among Chinese provinces, the second-largest within Central China, and the third-largest among inland ...

provinces; the speakers of these languages are predominantly " hill people", in contrast to the neighboring

Han Chinese The Han Chinese, alternatively the Han people, are an East Asian people, East Asian ethnic group native to Greater China. With a global population of over 1.4 billion, the Han Chinese are the list of contemporary ethnic groups, world's la ...

, who have settled the more fertile river valleys.

Relationships

Hmongic (Miao) and Mienic (Yao) are closely related, but clearly distinct. For internal classifications, see Hmongic languages and Mienic languages. The largest differences are due to divergent developments in their phonological systems. The Hmongic languages appear to have kept the large set of initial consonants featured in the protolanguage but greatly reduced the distinctions in the syllable finals, in particular losing all glides and stop codas. The Mienic languages, on the other hand, have largely preserved syllable finals but reduced the number of initial consonants. Early linguistic classifications placed the Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan family, where they remain in many Chinese classifications. The current consensus among Western

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

s is that they constitute a family of their own, the lexical and typological similarities among Hmong–Mien and

Sinitic languages The Sinitic languages (), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a language group, group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a p ...

being attributed to contact-induced influence. Paul K. Benedict, an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Hmong–Mien languages. The hypothesis never received much acceptance for Hmong–Mien, however."On the Thai evidence for Austro-Tai" (PDF)
in Selected Papers on Comparative Tai Studies, ed. R.J. Bickner et al., pp. 117–164. Center for South and Southeast Asian studies, the University of Michigan. Kosaka (2002) argued specifically for a Miao– Dai family.Kosaka, Ryuichi. 2002.
On the affiliation of Miao-Yao and Kadai: Can we posit the Miao-Dai family
" '' Mon-Khmer Studies'' 32:71-100.

Homeland

The most likely homeland of the Hmong–Mien languages is in Southern China between the

Yangtze The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ) is the longest river in Eurasia and the third-longest in the world. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flows including Dam Qu River the longest source of the Yangtze, i ...

and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages might have migrated from Central China either as part of the

expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han Chinese. Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to

took place during the 17th century (1600–1700). Ancient

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

evidence suggests that the ancestors of the speakers of the Hmong–Mien languages were a population genetically distinct from that of the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language source populations at a location on the

Yangtze River The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ) is the longest river in Eurasia and the third-longest in the world. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau and flows including Dam Qu River the longest source of the Yangtze, i ...

. Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports the proposition that people who speak the Hmong–Mien languages are descended from a population that is distantly related to those who now speak the Mon-Khmer languages. The date of Proto-Hmong–Mien has been estimated to be about 2500 BP (500 BC) by Sagart, Blench, and Sanchez-Mazas using traditional methods employing many lines of evidence, and about 4243 BP (2250 BC) by the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), an experimental algorithm for automatic generation of phonologically based phylogenies.

Names

The Mandarin names for these languages are ''Miáo'' and ''Yáo''. In Vietnamese, the name for Hmong is ''H'Mông'', and the name for Mien is ''Dao'' (i.e., Yao), although ''Miền'' is also used. ''Meo'', ''Hmu'', ''Mong'', ''Hmao'', and ''Hmong'' are local names for Miao, but since most Laotian refugees in the United States call themselves ''Hmong/Mong'', this name has become better known in English than the others in recent decades. However, except for some scholars who prefer the word, the term 'Hmong/Mong' is only used within certain Hmong/Miao language speaking communities in China, where the majority of the Miao speakers live. In Mandarin, despite the fact that it was once a derogatory term, the word ''Miao'' (Chinese: 苗; the tone varies according to the Sinitic dialect) is now commonly used by members of all nationalities to refer to the language and the ethnolinguistic group. The Mandarin name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality, which is a multicultural rather than ethnolinguistic group. It includes peoples speaking Mien, Kra–Dai, Yi, and Miao languages, the latter called ''Bùnǔ'' rather than ''Miáo'' when spoken by Yao. For this reason, the

ethnonym An ethnonym () is a name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms (whose name of the ethnic group has been created by another group of people) and autonyms, or endonyms (whose name is created and used ...

''Mien'' may be preferred as less ambiguous.

Characteristics

Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong–Mien languages tend to be

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. The word has originated from the Greek language Greek (, ; , ) is an Indo-European languages, Ind ...

and syntactically analytic. They are some of the most highly tonal languages in the world: Longmo and Zongdi Hmong have as many as twelve distinct tones. They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of

voiceless In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...

s and

uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not ...

s; otherwise their phonology is quite typical of the region. They are SVO in word order but are not as rigidly right-branching as the Tai–Kadai languages or most Mon–Khmer languages, since they have

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...

s and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in

adposition Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complemen ...

s: serial verb constructions replace most functions of adpositions in languages like English. For example, a construction translating as "be near" would be used where in English prepositions like "in" or "at" would be used.Goddard, ''The Languages of East and Southeast Asia''; p. 121 Besides their tonality and lack of adpositions, another striking feature is the abundance of numeral classifiers and their use where other languages use definite articles or demonstratives to modify nouns.

Mixed languages

Various unclassified Sinitic languages are spoken by ethnic Miao and Yao. These languages have variously been proposed as having Hmong-Mien substrata or as

mixed language A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language or fusion language, is a type of contact language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. ...

s, including languages such as

She Chinese She or Shehua (, ''Shēhuà'', meaning 'She speech') is an unclassified Sinitic language spoken by the She people of Southeastern China. It is also called Shanha, San-hak () or Shanhahua (). She speakers are located mainly in Fujian and Zhejia ...

, Laba, Lingling, Maojia, Badong Yao, various Lowland Yao languages including Yeheni,

Shaozhou Tuhua Shaozhou Tuhua (traditional: 韶州土話; simplified: 韶州土话 ''Sháozhōu Tǔhuà'' " Shaoguan Tuhua"), also known as Yuebei Tuhua (), is an unclassified Chinese variety spoken in northern Guangdong province, China. It is mutually unintel ...

, and various Pinghua dialects.

References

External links

Basic vocabulary word lists of Hmong–Mien languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hmong-Mien Languages Language families