What is Hmong?
Hmong is a language group that is a part of the Hmong-Mien language family. It is spoken by ethnic Hmong throughout parts of northern Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and parts of China. There are more than four million speakers of different Hmong languages.
The Hmong people are an ethnic group with origins in southern China. From the 18th century on the Hmong made their way south, and settled in parts of Laos, and northern Thailand, Vietnam, and Burma. Large numbers of Hmong refugees have made their way to the United States, Canada, and other western nations since the 1970s, after they were singled out by the communist government of Laos for their role in fighting the Pathet Lao.
The Hmong-Mien language family contains not just the various Hmong languages, but also the Yao languages of Iu Mien, Ba Pai, and Kim Mun. The term Mien is somewhat controversial when discussing the broader Hmong community, as it is considered a pejorative term by most non-Chinese Hmong peoples. The term Hmong is preferred as a general category, with various sub-groups called by their Hmong names.
Hmong as a language is really more of a dialect continuum, similar to some other Asian language groupings. Some of these dialects are mutually intelligible, but generally as one gets further and further away from a specific dialect’s region the chances that the new dialect will be understood decrease.
There are two major Hmong dialects spoken by Hmong peoples who have settled in the United States. These are known as Green Mong, or Mong Njua, and White Hmong, or Hmong Daw. The dialects are mutually intelligible, but feature fairly substantial differences in terms of pronunciation, and have quite different vocabularies. Both Hmong Daw and Mong Njua are spoken primarily in China and Laos. Other important Hmong dialects include: Hmong Dong, Hmong Shua, and Hmong Do from Vietnam, and Hmong Eastern Huishui, Hmong Chonganjiang, Hmong Central Huishui, and Hmong Central Mashan from China.
Like English, Hmong follows a Subject-Verb-Object sentence structure. Unlike English, however, the order of words may be shifted without a change in case. Unlike English, Hmong contains no gender differences in personal pronouns like he/she, and the subjective and objective cases are the same, with no difference like me/I in English. Hmong also doesn’t include markers at the end of words to show tense, like the English -ed, instead relying on context and assistant words to show the sentence aspect. Hmong also doesn’t require an agreement between parts of a sentence in the way English requires, for example, a subject-object agreement in a sentence like She is tired.
The Hmong language is fairly stable, with a strong community structure both in homelands and in immigrant populations. Although many Hmong who move to countries such as the United States learn English, there is a continuity of Hmong within the home as well, and Hmong-language classes are taught in most urban centers with a large Hmong population. As a result, Hmong is in little to no danger of going extinct, and it is fact relatively easy for an outsider to learn the language, as a great number of resources exist to help with education.
Written by Brendan McGuigan
