Mizo language

All you want to know about Mizo language

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Mizo
Spoken in: India, Bangladesh, Myanmar 
Region: Mizoram, Tripura, Assam, Manipur
Total speakers: 700,000+

674,756 in India (2001 census);12,500 in Myanmar (1983);1,041 in Bangladesh (1981 census)
Language family: Sino-Tibetan
 Tibeto-Burman
  Kamarupan
   Kuki-Chin-Naga
    Kuki-Chin
     Mizo 
Official status
Official language in: Mizoram (India)
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: lus
ISO 639-3: lus
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Mizo language is spoken in Mizoram, known as the Lushai Hills District till 1954, and which is now a state in the Indian Union. The word Mizo is a generic term applying to all Mizos living in Mizoram and its adjoining areas of Manipur, Tripura, the Chittagong Hill tracts and Chin Hills. Mizo literally means "Highlander" (mi = "people", zo = "highland"). The language is also known as Lushai (per Ethnologue.com and ISO 639-3).

Contents

History

The language of the Mizo comes under the Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman. The numerous clans of the Mizo had respective dialects, amongst which the Mizo dialect, originally known as Duhlian or Lusei (by the Mizo themselves), was most common, and which subsequently became the lingua franca of the state.

Writing System

Christian missionaries started developing a script for the language adopting the Roman alphabet with a phonetic form of spelling based on the Hunterian system of transliteration. The letters and digraphs used are: a, â, á, à, aw, b, ch, d, e, ê, é, è, f, g, ng, h, i, ì, í, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, û, v, and z.

Sounds

Later there were radical developments in the language where the symbol â used for the sound of long o was replaced by aŵ with a circumflex, and the symbol a used for plain o was changed to aw without any diacritic. The following few words suggest that Mizo and the Burmese are of the same family: kun ("to bend"), kam ("bank of a river"), kha ("bitter"), sam ("hair"), mei ("fire"), that ("to kill"), ni ("sun").

Phonetics

In Mizo, large groups of words are obviously related to one another both in sound and in meaning, but not by any regular systematic pattern. For example: puar ("slightly bulging"), na ("to feel pain"), lang ("to float"), huan ("garden"), thiam ("to know", such as languages or knowledge), thau ("fat"), lian ("big"), buai ("to be troubled of"), pem ("to move from one town or city to another"), puan ("a piece of cloth"), puar ("to bulge", as in a goitre), hmelchhia ("ugly"), piang ("born"), ropui ("great", "mighty", "powerful"), bial ("round", "bulbous").

Consonants

Mizo is a tonal language, in which differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words. Tone systems have developed independently in many of the daughter languages largely through 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, while falling and rising tones developed from syllable-final h and glottal stop, which themselves often reflect earlier consonants.

Grammar

Mizo contains many analyzable polysyllables, which are polysyllabic units in which the individual syllables have meaning by themselves. In a true monosyllabic language, polysyllables are mostly confined to compound words, such as "lighthouse". The first syllables of compounds tend over time to be distressed, and may eventually be reduced to prefixed consonants. The word nungtheihna ("survival") is composed of nung ("to live"), theih ("possible") and na (a nominalizing suffix); likewise, theihna means "possibility". Virtually all polysyllabic morphemes in Mizo can be shown to originate in this way. For example, the disyllabic form phengphehlep ("butterfly"), which occurs in one dialect of the Trung (or Dulung) language of Yunnan, is actually a reduced form of the compound blak kwar, found in a closely related dialect. It is reported over 18 of the dialects share about 850 words with the same meaning. For example, ban ("arm"), ke ("leg"), thla ("wing", "month"), lu ("head") and kut ("hand").

Dialects

Fannai, Chhangte, Ngente, Ralte, Bawm, Lai, Mara (Lakher), Tlau, Le. Related to Hmar, Pankhu. Mizo is known as Chin in Burma.

Mizo literature

The Mizo language has a thriving literature with a Mizo Department at Mizoram University.

Statistics

There are around 700,000 speakers of Mizo dialects (Dulien, Duhlian Twang, Kuki, Laizo, Lusai, Lushai, Lusei, Lushei, Lukhai, Lusago, Sailo, Hualngo, Whelngo): 674,756 speakers in India (2001 census); 1,041 speakers in Bangladesh (1981 census); 12,500 speakers in Myanmar (1983 census).

See also

References

  1. The Ethnologue, 13th Edition, Barbara F. Grimes, Editor, 1996, Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc.
  2. K. S. Singh: 1995, People of India-Mizoram, Volume XXXIII, Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta.
  3. 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.
  4. Grierson, G. A: 1995, Languages of North-Eastern India, Gian Publishing House, New Delhi.
  5. Malsawmtluanga, 1994 Mizoram, Aizawl

External links

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