The Iu Mien language (, ; zh, 勉語 or ; or ) is the language spoken by the Iu Mien people in China (where they are considered a constituent group of the Yao peoples), Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and, more recently, the United States in diaspora. Like other Mien languages, it is tonal and

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 ...

. Linguists in China consider the dialect spoken in Changdong, Jinxiu Yao Autonomous County,

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 ...

to be the standard. This standard is also spoken by Iu Mien in the West, however, because most are

refugees A refugee, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is a person "forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as ...

from

Laos Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR), is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by Myanmar and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the southeast, and Thailand to the west and ...

, their dialect incorporates influences from the Lao and Thai languages. Iu Mien has 78%

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. ...

with Kim Mun (Lanten), 70% with Biao-Jiao Mien, and 61% with Dzao Min.

Geographic distribution

In China, it is spoken in the following counties (Mao 2004:302–303). There are 130,000 speakers in Hunan province, and 400,000 speakers in

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

and

Jiangxi ; Gan: ) , translit_lang1_type2 = , translit_lang1_info2 = , translit_lang1_type3 = , translit_lang1_info3 = , image_map = Jiangxi in China (+all claims hatched).svg , mapsize = 275px , map_caption = Location ...

provinces. *''

'': Yangshuo, Lingui, Guanyang, Ziyuan, Xing'an, Longsheng, Gongcheng, Yongfu, Luzhai, Lipu, Mengshan, Pingle, Jinxiu, Yishan, Rong'an, Rongshui, Luocheng, Huanjiang, Shanglin, Xincheng, Laibin, Baise, Napo, Lingyun, Tianlin, Cangwu, Hezhou, Fuchuan, Zhaoping, Fangcheng, Shangsi *''

'':

Yingde Yingde (Postal romanization, postal: Yingtak; ) is a historical city in the north of Guangdong Province, China. The city is on the Bei River, a tributary of the Pearl River (China), Pearl River. Administratively, it is part of the Qingyuan, Guan ...

, Lechang, Shixing, Qujiang, Renhua, Wengyuan, Ruyuan, Liannan, Lianshan, Yangshan, Yangchun *''

'': Hekou, Jinping, Honghe, Mengla, Malipo, Maguan, Gangnan, Funing, Wenshan *''

'': Rongjiang, Congjiang, Sandu, Danzhai, Leishan, Zhenfeng, Luodian *''

'': Quannan, Shanggao *''

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 ...

'': Jianghua, Yongzhou, Shuangpai, Xintian, Changning, Daoxian, Lanshan, Lingxian, Ningyuan, Jiangyong, Dong'an,

Chenzhou Chenzhou () is a prefecture-level city located in the south of Hunan province, China, bordering the provinces of Jiangxi to the east and Guangdong to the south. Its administrative area covers , 9.2% of the provincial area, and its total populatio ...

, Zixing, Lingwu,

Guiyang Guiyang; Mandarin pronunciation: ; Chinese postal romanization, alternatively as Kweiyang is the capital of Guizhou, Guizhou province in China. It is centrally located within the province, on the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau, eastern part of the Yun ...

, Xinning, Yizhang, Chengbu, Qiyang, Chenxi; also in Longzha Township (龙渣瑶族乡), Yanling County In Vietnam, Dao people belonging to the Đại Bản, Tiểu Bản, Quần Chẹt, Ô Gang, Cóc Ngáng, and Cóc Mùn subgroups speak Iu Mien dialects.

Phonology

Consonants

There are 31 cited consonant

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

in Iu Mien. A distinguishing feature of Iu Mien consonants is the presence of voiceless nasals and laterals. # The standard spelling system for Iu Mien does not represent the stop sounds in a way that corresponds to the IPA symbols, but instead uses e.g. , , and to represent . This may stem from an attempt to model the Iu Mien spelling system on

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

(used to represent

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

), where and represent . The Pinyin influence is also seen in the use of , , and to represent the alveolar affricates and , , and for the postalveolar affricates . The use of to represent the velar nasal means that it cannot also be used to represent , as would be predicted; instead, is used. # According to Aumann and Pan, in a certain Chinese dialect, the postalveolar affricates are instead palatal stops (). # According to Daniel Bruhn, the voiceless nasals are actually sequences (i.e. a short nasalized followed by a voiced nasal), while the voiceless lateral is actually a voiceless lateral fricative . # Bruhn also observed that younger-generation Iu Mien Americans were more likely to substitute the voiceless nasals and voiceless laterals with and the

alveolo-palatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (alveolopalatal, ''alveo-palatal'' or ''alveopalatal'') consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simu ...

affricates with their corresponding

palato-alveolar Postalveolar (post-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the ''back'' of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but n ...

variants.

Onset

It appears that all single consonant phonemes except can occur as the onset.

Coda

Unlike Hmong, which generally prohibits coda consonants, Iu Mien has seven single consonant phonemes that can take the coda position. These consonants are . Some of the stops can only occur as final consonants when accompanied by certain tones; for example, only occurs with the tone or .

Vowels

Iu Mien vowels are represented in the Iu Mien United Script using combinations of the six letters, , , , , , and . According to Bruhn, the

monophthongs A monophthong ( ) is a pure vowel sound, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

are , , , , , , , , , and . The

diphthongs A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of ...

are , , , , , , , . Furthermore, additional diphthongs and triphthongs can be formed from the aforementioned vowels through - or -on-gliding (having or before the vowel). Such vowels attested by Bruhn include , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and . The dialect studied by Bruhn, and described in the above table, has a phoneme that does not have its own spelling, but is represented in various contexts either as or (which are also used for and , respectively). In all cases where is spelled , and nearly all cases where it is spelled , it does not contrast with or , respectively, and can be viewed as an allophone of these sounds. The only potential exception appears to be when occurring as a syllable final by itself, where it has an extremely restricted distribution, occurring only after the (alveolo-)palatal consonants . The sound may be a secondary development from in this context, although Bruhn does not discuss this issue.

Tones

Iu Mien 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 ...

with six observed tonemes. In the Iu Mien United Script (the language's most common writing system), tones are not marked with diacritics; rather, a word's tone is indicated by a special marker letter at the end of the word. If a word lacks a marker, then it is to be pronounced with a middle tone.

Grammar

Iu Mien is an

analytic language An analytic language is a type of natural language in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely. This is opposed to synthetic languages, which synthesi ...

and lacks

inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...

. It is also a monosyllabic language, with most of its

lexicon A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...

consisting of one

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

. The language follows a SVO word order. Some other

syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...

properties include the following: *

Adjectives An adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, ...

usually follow

nouns In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.Example n ...

. * Question words like those meaning 'where' generally come at the end of sentences. * The negative word (often shortened to ) may occur before verbs to negate them. * A prevalence of contractions. Some words consist of a contracted syllable followed by an uncontracted second syllable (in IMUS, these syllables are separated by apostrophes). One such example is ("spider"), a contraction of ("insect-spider").

Writing system

In the past, the lack of an

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

caused low rates of

literacy Literacy is the ability to read and write, while illiteracy refers to an inability to read and write. Some researchers suggest that the study of "literacy" as a concept can be divided into two periods: the period before 1950, when literacy was ...

amongst the Iu Mien speakers. It had been written with

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

in China; however, this is extremely difficult for Iu Mien speakers from other countries such as

and from groups who now live in the West. In an effort to address this, an Iu Mien Unified Script was created in 1984 using the Latin script, based on an earlier orthography developed in China. Unlike the

Vietnamese language Vietnamese () is an Austroasiatic languages, Austroasiatic language Speech, spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language. It belongs to the Vietic languages, Vietic subgroup of the Austroasiatic language family. Vietnamese is s ...

, this alphabet does not use any diacritics to distinguish tones or different vowel sounds, and only uses the 26 letters of the

ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and u ...

. This orthography distinguishes 30 initials, 128 finals, and eight tones. Hyphens are used to link adjectives with the nouns they modify. The alphabet is similar to the RPA used to write the

Hmong language Hmong or Mong ( ; Romanized Popular Alphabet, RPA: , Chữ Hmông Việt, CHV: ''Hmôngz'', Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong, Nyiakeng Puachue: , Pahawh: , ) is a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmongic languages spoken by the Hmong p ...

and the

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin'' literally ...

transcription scheme used for Chinese.

IMUS spelling-to-sound correspondences

Films

The following films feature the Iu Mien language: *2003 – ''Death of a Shaman''. Directed by Richard Hall; produced by Fahm Fong Saeyang. *2010 – "Siang-Caaux Mienh". A story of a very irresponsible family man, alcoholic, and drug addict. He likes his bad friends but he does not love his family. But as he starts paying his mistakes, has become a turning point in his life. *2011 – "Mborqv Jaax Ciangv". A moving family friendly movie.

Notes

References

* * * * * * * ; Dissertations * *

External links

An Online Blog by Iu Mien AmericansThe Iu-Mien Community OnlineMien Kingdom – Community ForumOLAC resources in and about the Iu Mien languageWorld Atlas of Language Structures entryLearnMien.comFree Iu Mien - English Dictionary
{{Authority control Mienic languages Languages of Hunan Languages of Guizhou Languages of Guangxi Languages of Guangdong Languages of Yunnan Languages of Vietnam Languages of Thailand Languages of Laos