Mizo is a
Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in the Indian state of
Mizoram
Mizoram is a states and union territories of India, state in northeastern India, with Aizawl as its Capital city, capital and largest city. It shares 722-kilometres (449 miles) of international borders with Bangladesh to the west, and Myanmar t ...
, where it is the
official language
An official language is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as, "the language or one of the languages that is accepted by a country's government, is taught in schools, used in the courts of law, etc." Depending on the decree, establishmen ...
and
lingua franca
A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...
. It is the mother tongue of the
Mizo people
The Mizo people, historically called the Lushais, are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group primarily from Mizoram in northeastern India. They speak Mizo, one of the state's official languages and its lingua franca. Beyond Mizoram, sizable Mizo commu ...
and some members of the
Mizo diaspora. Other than Mizoram, it is also spoken in
Meghalaya
Meghalaya (; "the abode of clouds") is a states and union territories of India, state in northeast India. Its capital is Shillong. Meghalaya was formed on 21 January 1972 by carving out two districts from the Assam: the United Khasi Hills an ...
,
Manipur
Manipur () is a state in northeastern India with Imphal as its capital. It borders the Indian states of Assam to the west, Mizoram to the south, and Nagaland to the north and shares the international border with Myanmar, specifically t ...
,
Tripura
Tripura () is a States and union territories of India, state in northeastern India. The List of states and union territories of India by area, third-smallest state in the country, it covers ; and the seventh-least populous state with a populat ...
, and
Assam
Assam (, , ) is a state in Northeast India, northeastern India, south of the eastern Himalayas along the Brahmaputra Valley, Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Assam covers an area of . It is the second largest state in Northeast India, nor ...
states of India,
Sagaing Region
Sagaing Region (, ; formerly Sagaing Division) is an administrative divisions of Myanmar, administrative region of Myanmar, located in the north-western part of the country between latitude 21° 30' north and longitude 94° 97' east. It is border ...
and
Chin State
Chin State (, ) is a state in western Myanmar. Chin State is bordered by Sagaing Division and Magway Division to the east, Rakhine State to the south, the Chattogram Division of Bangladesh to the west, and the Indian states of Mizoram to th ...
in Myanmar, and
Chittagong Hill Tracts
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (), often shortened to simply the Hill Tracts and abbreviated to CHT, refers to the three hilly districts within the Chittagong Division in southeastern Bangladesh, bordering India and Myanmar (Burma) in the east: Kh ...
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
The Mizo people, historically called the Lushais, are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group primarily from Mizoram in northeastern India. They speak Mizo, one of the state's official languages and its lingua franca. Beyond Mizoram, sizable Mizo commu ...
to be encountered by the
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.
* British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...
in the course of
their colonial expansion.
[Lalthangliana, B., '''Mizo tihin ṭawng a nei lo' tih kha''](_blank)
, see als
Matisoff, 'Language names' section
/ref>
Classification
Mizo is related to the other languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family
Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a language family, family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European languages, Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan languag ...
. The Zohnahtlak languages (which native Mizo speakers call ''Zohnahthlâk ṭawngho''/''Mizo ṭawngho'') have a substantial number of words in common.
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:[Weidert, Alfons, ''Component Analysis of Lushai Phonology'', Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV – Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, volume 2, Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1975.]
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 suau''
Consonants
Mizo has the following consonants, with the first symbol being its orthographical form and the second one its representation in the IPA:
# 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
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...
. Tone systems have developed independently in many daughter languages, largely by simplifications in the set of possible syllable-final and syllable-initial consonants. Typically, a distinction between voiceless and voiced initial consonants is replaced by a distinction between high and low tone, and falling and rising tones developed from syllable-final ''h'' and glottal stop, which themselves often reflect earlier consonants.
The eight tones and intonations that the vowel ''a'' (and the vowels ''aw'', ''e'', ''i'', ''u'', which constitutes all the tones in Mizo) can have are shown by the letter sequence p-a-n-g, as follows:
* long high tone: páng as in ''páng là'' (which has the same intonation as sáng in the sentence ''Thingküng sáng tak kan huanah a ding'').
* long low tone: pàng as in ''Tui a kawt pàng pâng mai'' (which has the same intonation as vàng in the word ''vànglaini'').
* peaking tone: pâng as in ''Tui a kawt pàng pâng mai'' (which has the same intonation as thlûk in ''I hla phuah thlûk chu a va mawi ve'').
* dipping tone: päng as in ''Tuibur a hmuam päng mai'' (which has the same intonation as säm in ''Kan huan ka säm vêl mai mai'').
* short rising tone: pǎng as in ''naupǎng'' (which has the same intonation as thǎng in ''Kan huanah thǎng ka kam'').
* short falling tone: pȧng as in ''I va inkhuih pȧng ve?'' (which has the same intonation as pȧn in ''I lam ka rawn pȧn '')
* short mid tone: pang as in ''A dik lo nghâl pang'' (which has the same tone as man in ''Sazu ka man '')
* short low tone: pạng as in ''I pạng a sá a nih kha'' (which has the same tone as chạl in ''I chạlah thosí a ''fù'' '').
Note that the exact orthography of tones with diacritics is still not standardised (notably for differentiating the four short tones with confusive or conflicting choices of diacritics) 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 (e.g. by appending some apostrophe or glottal letter) to reduce the number of diacritics needed to only four (those used now for the long tones) 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'' (simple future),
*''tawh'' (simple past
The simple past, past simple, or past indefinite, in English equivalent to the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular E ...
and past perfect
The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, characterizes certain verb forms and grammatical tenses involving an action from an antecedent point in time. Examples in English are: "we ''had arrived''" ...
),
*''mék'' ( progressive tenses, present and past),
*''dáwn'' ( simple future),
*''dáwn mék'' ( near future),
Modification of verbs
Mizo gerunds and past participles are formed by a change in word ending called .
Nouns
Mizo nouns undergo declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...
into cases.
Nouns are plural
In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
ised by suffixing ''-te'', ''-ho'', ''-teho'' or ''-hote''.
Pronouns
All Mizo pronouns
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
occur in two forms, namely in free form and clitic form and are declined into cases.
Negation
For declarative sentences, negation
In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation (mathematics), operation that takes a Proposition (mathematics), proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P, P^\prime or \over ...
is achieved by adding the particle ''lo'' (not) at the end of a sentence:
Cardinal numbers
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Writing system
The Mizo alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions su ...
and has 25 letters.
A written script for Lushai was created in 1874 by Thomas Herbert Lwein. In its current form, it was devised by the first Christian missionaries
A Christian mission is an organized effort to carry on evangelism, in the name of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries. Sometimes individuals are sent and ...
of Mizoram, J. H. Lorrain and F. W. Savidge, based on the Hunterian system of transliteration
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
.
A circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
''^'' 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
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is an international document adopted by the United Nations General Assembly that enshrines the Human rights, rights and freedoms of all human beings. Drafted by a UN Drafting of the Universal D ...
:
Literature
Mizo has a thriving literature, which has both written
Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of language. A writing system includes a particular set of symbols called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which they encode a particular spoken language. Every written language ...
and oral tradition
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...
s.
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.
See also
* Mizo name
* Mizo honorifics
Notelist
References
Sources
# K. S. Singh: 1995, People of India-Mizoram, Volume XXXIII, Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta.
# Grierson, G. A. (Ed.) (1904b). Tibeto-Burman Family: Specimens of the Kuki-Chin and Burma Groups, Volume III Part III of Linguistic Survey of India. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta.
# Grierson, G. A: 1995, Languages of North-Eastern India, Gian Publishing House, New Delhi.
# Lunghnema, V., ''Mizo chanchin'' (B.C. 300 aṭanga 1929 A.D.), 1993.
# Zoramdinthara, Dr., ''Mizo Fiction: Emergence and Development''. Ruby Press & Co.(New Delhi). 2013.
External links
* Lorrain, J. Herbert (James Herbert)
Dictionary of the Lushai language
'. Calcutta : Asiatic Society, 1940 (Bibliotheca Indica, 261).
Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus database
Mizoram.nic.in
– official website of Mizoram.
Mizo Language Resource
collection of Mizo language documentation in the Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) archive
{{Authority control
Languages of Mizoram
Languages of Bangladesh
Kuki-Chin languages
Object–subject–verb languages
Languages of Myanmar
Official languages of India
Languages of India