| Hmong–Mien | |
|---|---|
| Miao–Yao | |
| Geographic distribution: |
China, Southeast Asia |
| Linguistic classification: | One of the world's primary language families |
| Proto-language: | Proto-Hmong–Mien |
| Subdivisions: | |
| ISO 639-5: | hmx |
Hmongic languages in red, Mienic languages in purple
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The Hmong–Mien aka Miao–Yao languages are a language family of southern China and Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Hubei provinces, where its speakers have been relegated to being "hill people," while the Han Chinese have settled the more fertile river valleys. Within the last 300–400 years, the Hmong and some Mien people have migrated to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Burma. As a result of the Indochina Wars, many Hmong speakers left Southeast Asia for Australia, the United States, and other countries.
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Hmong (Miao) and Mien (Yao) are clearly distinct, but closely related. For internal classifications, see Hmongic languages and Mienic languages. Early linguistic classifications placed the Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan family, where they remain in many Chinese classifications, but the current consensus among Western linguists is that they constitute a family of their own. The family is believed to have had its origins in central China. The current area of greatest agreement is that the languages appeared in the region between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but there is reason to believe that speakers migrated there from further north with the expansion of the Han Chinese.[1]
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.[2]
The Mandarin names for these languages are Miáo and Yáo.
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, the name Hmong is not used in China, where the majority of the Miao speakers live.
The Chinese name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality, which is a cultural rather than ethno-linguistic group. It includes peoples speaking the Mien, Tai–Kadai, Yi, and Miao languages. For this reason the ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous.
Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong–Mien languages tend to be monosyllabic 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.[3] They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of voiceless sonorants and uvular consonants; otherwise their phonology is also 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 genitives and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in adpositions: 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 preopositions like "in" or "at" would be used.[4]
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.