The
Hmong-Mien or
Miao-Yao languages are a small
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
Myanmar. As a result of the
Indochina Wars, many Hmong speakers left Southeast Asia for
Australia, the
United States, and other countries.
Relationships
Hmong (Miao) and Mien (Yao) are clearly distinct, but closely related. The relationship of the poorly known
Ho Ne (or Huo Nie) of the
Shē is obscure, though it may be closest to Mien. Part of the difficulty is that it has been strongly influenced by neighboring tongues. One proposed internal classification is listed below.
Earlier linguistic classifications placed the Hmong-Mien languages into the
Sino-Tibetan language 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 has its origins in southern or perhaps even 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.
Paul K. Benedict, an American scholar, extended the
Austric theory to include the
Kradai family of Southeast Asia and the Hmong-Mien languages, together forming an
Austro-Tai superfamily. The Austro-Tai hypothesis never received wide acceptance, however.
[, 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.]Names
The Mandarin names for these languages are
Miáo and
Yáo.
Meo,
Hmu,
Mong, 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 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,
Kadai,
Yi, and Miao languages. For this reason the
ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous.
Characteristics
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. 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
Kradai 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.
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.
Proposed internal classification
Ethnologue lists 35 Hmong-Mien languages, some of which are mutually intelligible. The following classification follows
Matisoff 2001.
- **Xiangxi Miao (Red Miao)
- **Hmong proper (includes Hmong Njua (Blue/Green Miao), Hmong Daw (White Miao), and Magpie Miao)
- **Qiandong Miao (Black Miao)
In addition, the position of
Ho Ne is obscure.
For an examination of alternate schemes such as the one by Strecker and one prepared for Miao by Chinese linguists, see .
