Mru, also known as Mrung (Murung), is a Sino-Tibetan language of Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is spoken by a community of Mrus (Mros) inhabiting the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh with a population of 22,000 according to the 1991 census, and in Rakhine State,

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 C. Wells, Joh ...

. The Mrus are the second-largest tribal group in Bandarban District of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. A small group of Mros also live in Rangamati Hill District.

Classification

Mru forms the Mruic language branch with Hkongso and Anu, which are spoken in Paletwa Township, Chin State,

. The position of Mruic with Sino-Tibetan is unclear.

Distribution

The Mros live in forest areas of Lama, Ruma, Alikaram, and Thanchi near Chimbuk Mountain of Bandarban District, Bangladesh (Rashel 2009). In

, they also live in Buthidaung Township and

Ponnagyun Township Ponnagyun Township ( my, ပုဏ္ဏားကျွန်းမြို့နယ်), formally known as Urittaung is a township of Sittwe District in the Rakhine State of Myanmar. The principal town is Ponnagyun. There are 94 village groups i ...

in Sittwe District (Akiab), Rakhine State.

Subdivisions

''Ethnologue'' (22nd edition) lists 3 main dialects as Anok, Dowpreng (Dopreng), and Sungma (Tshungma), as well as the 2 minor dialects of Domrong and Rumma. *Anok: largest and central *Tshungma: in the north *Domrong: in the lowlands north of the Matamuri *Dopreng: in far south and into Arakan *Rumma: in far south and into Arakan There are five Mru dialects according to Ebersole (1996). *Anawk *Süngma *Dopreng *Tamsa *Rengmitsa There are five major Mro clans (Rashel 2009). *Dengua *Premsang *Kongloi *Maizer *Ganaroo Gnar Rashel (2009) also lists another classification scheme which lists ten Mro clans. *Yarua (subdivisions below) **Khatpo **Chimlung **Zongnow *Sangkan *Chawla *Ngaringcha *Tang *Deng *Kough *Tam-tu-chah *Kanbak *Prenju *Naichah *Yomore *Rum/Rumthu

Grammar

Unlike the Kuki-Chin languages, Mru has SVO ( subject-verb-object) word order (Ebersole 1996).

Phonology

Consonants

/s/ can also be heard as �

Vowels

Numerals

Rashel (2009:159) lists the following Mro numerals. #lok #pre #sum #tle #tnga #trok #rinit #riyat #tako #homod

Script

The Mru script is an indigenous, messianic script: In the 1980s Menlay Murang (also known as Manley Mro) created the religion of Khrama (or Crama) and with it a new script for the Mru language. The script is written from left to right and has its own set of digits. It does not use tone marks. The Mru language is written in both the Latin and Mru scripts.

Unicode

The Mru alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for the Mru script, called Mro, is U+16A40–U+16A6F:

References

* Ebersole, Harold. 1996. ''The Mru Language: A preliminary grammatical sketch''. Ms. * Peterson, David A.
"Where does Mru fit into Tibeto-Burman?"
''The 42nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics'' (ICSTLL 42), November 2009, Payap University, Chiangmai, Thailand. Cf. p. 14. * Rashel, Md Mostafa (2009).
Morphosyntactic Analysis of Mro Language
" ''Dhaka University Journal of Linguistics'', Vol, 2, No, 3, February 2009, 141–160.