THE SOUNDS OF HMONGWilliam ChangDecember 15, 2005Linguistics 110 Course ProjectLanguage & Language ConsultantThe Hmong (Hmong: Hmoob) are an aboriginal people group of China, referred to withinChina as Miao (Chinese: 苗族, miáozú). Starting in the 18thcentury, large numbers migratedto Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar. In the second half of the 20thcentury, as a resultof the Indochina and Vietnam wars, some migrated to America, French Guiana, France, andAustralia. The number of Hmong worldwide is very difficult to fix. Most Hmong live inChina, and I have seen figures for the population there to range from 7 million (1999 figure,Ethnologue) to 10 million (2000 Chinese census, according to Wikipedia). A figure I haveseen for t he number of Hmong worldwide, however, is 6 million (1999 figure, Eth nologue).The language that my language consultant speaks is Hmong Daw (Hmong: Hmoob Dawb), orWhite Hmong, which henceforth will si mply be called Hmong. The number of speakers ofHmong Daw is at least 165,000 worldwide (Ethnologue). It is mutually intelligible withMong Leng, or Green Hmong . (The color words arise from traditional Chinesedesignations for the tribes based on the color of women’s dresses.) These are but aprominent two of many Hmong languages, of which Ethnologue reports 21. Theselanguages are in turn related to other Hmongic languages such as Bunu, and they together inturn form the largest constituent in Hmong-Mien, which has 35 languages in all.No broader classification has had scholarly consensus. Traditional ly Chinese linguists haveheld that Hmong is related to Chinese, but if there is any genetic relation at all, it is toodistant to detect. Inquiries into the possibility of genetic relation with Tai, Austronesian, orMon-Khmer languages have been inconclusive. It is true, however, that Hmong andChinese share many words through borrowing. Moreover, like many of its neighbors,Hmong morphemes are preponderantly monosyllabic and always bear a tone, and Hmongwords are highly analytic.My consultant was Ia Her (Iab Hawj, [íə hâɨ]), a 21 year old woman and a student at Cal. Shegrew up in a r efugee camp for Hmong in the town of Chiangkham, in the province Pha Yao,in Thailand. Her family had moved there from Laos. Her mother speaks only Hmong, andher father speaks Hmong and has limited proficiency in Laotian. Ia spoke only Hmong, andwas exposed minimal ly to Th ai and other la nguages. She was taught the Hmong RPA(Romanized Popular Alphabet) at a school for Hmong children, which proved useful duringour sessions for naming and eliciting sounds. At age 8, her family moved to Sacramento,California, where they currently reside. She speaks Hmong frequently with her fami ly.I wish to express heartfelt gratitude to Ia for the opportunity to study th e sounds of alanguage I found both marvelous and elegant. Ua koj tsaug.1Overview of Hmong PhonologyThe basic phonological unit in Hmong is the syllable, not the word. Most morphemes aremonosyllabic, and most syllables have transparent meanings. Words, if polymorphemic, areanalytic, and for this reason, they are sometimes called “terms”, with the morphe mesthemselves being called “words”. I will try to steer clear of such ambiguities in this report.Each Hmong syllable has an onset, a rime, and a tone, out of a total possible of 57 ons ets, 13rimes, and 7 tones. What complexity there is in the onset is made up for in the simplicity ofsyllable codas, for the rimes are all zero-coda, except for two that end in [ŋ].In a language such as Hmong, it is more convenient to speak of onsets and rimes than ofsegments. Whereas it is quite right to say that an onset such as [mpl], which represents apre-nasalized bilabial stop with an overlapping lateral, is 3 distinct segments, the fact thatsuch clusters are relatively few compared to the number of segments in the languagepersuades me to structure my analysis around onsets and rimes r ather than aroundsegments.This report will discuss onsets, rimes and tones in 3 respective sections. The difficult matterof interactions between adjacent syllables will not receive systematic treatment, but will betouched on throughout. There are three appendices: an explanation of the romaniza ti onscheme used in this report (Hmong RPA); a word list of some of the words that wereelicited during this project; and a list of words that exemplify each onset, rime, and toneencountered.2ONSETSThe 57 syllable onsets for Hmong are given in Table 1, below. Please see Appendix C forexemplifications. The best way to canvass such a large i nventory of sounds is to discussphonemes individually as n ecessary, and by class when generalizations suffice.BilabialBilabialwith lateralLabiodentalInterdentalDentalDental affricateAlveolarRetroflexPost-alveolaraffricateAlveolopalatalPalatalVelarUvularGlott alPlain stopp pl t ts ʈ tʃ c k q ʔ+ aspirationpʰ plʰ tʰ tsʰ ʈʰ tʃʰ cʰ kʰ qʰPrenasalized stopmp mpl nt nts ɳʈ ntʃ ɲc ŋk ɴq+ aspiration*mpʰmplʰ ntʰ ntsʰ ɳʈʰ ntʃʰ ɲcʰ ŋkʰ ɴqʰVoiced stopdVoiced aspirated stopdʰNasal (voiced)m ml n ɲNasal (voiceless)m> *m>J n> ɲ>Fricative (voiceless)f s ʂ ɕ hFricative (voiced)v ʐApproximantjLateral fricativeɬLateral approximantlTable 1: Hmong Syllable Onsets. Asterisks mark onsets for which a word could not befound, but which were recognized by the speaker as part of the language. All referenceson Hmong include them.Plain StopsFor unvoiced and unaspirated stops, not counting co-articulations and affricates, there are 7places of articulation: b ilabial, interdental, retroflex, palatal, velar, u vular, and glottal. The3bilabial, velar, and glottal stops are much as they are in English, and require no explanation.Glottal stops occur only as onsets in syllables that would otherwise be without an onset.Thus it w as unclear whether glottal stop was a real phoneme , o r merely an epiphenomen onarising from the need for speakers to begin u tterances with something or divide up syllables.Ia always made glottal stops in words like [ ku@ ʔí] “eleve n”, but I inten ti onally spoke theword to her without the glottal stop and she said it soun ded fin e.Interdental stops are made with the tongue poking out slightly between the upper and lowerteeth. Retroflex stops are made with th e underside of the tongue tip pressed against thegum ridge and the back of the top front teeth. These two stops are not very distinct to aspeaker of Engl ish: subjectively