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Mutual Intelligibility

Sounds: Consonants, Vowels, and Tones

Learning English

Language

The Hmong in Laos, Thailand, and the United States speak Hmong Der (White Hmong) and Mong Leng (Blue Mong).7 Mong Leng is also frequently written as Hmong Leng, spelled with an initial H, but some Mong Leng speakers prefer the term without the initial H, and we follow that preference in this profile.

Hmong Der and Mong Leng are dialects in the Hmong branch of the Hmong-Mien family, spoken in Southeast Asia and southern China. The Chinese designation for Hmong-Mien is Miao-Yao, but because that designation is not based on language exclusively, most linguists outside of China prefer the term Hmong-Mien. Anthropologists, who are interested in things other than language, continue to use the term Miao-Yao.

More than half of the words in Hmong Der and Mong Leng are Chinese in origin, and there are similarities in grammatical structure between Hmong Der/Mong Leng and Chinese, as well. For these reasons, scholars in the past classified Hmong-Mien as members of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Today, however, most linguists outside of China believe that the similarities between Hmong Der/Mong Leng and Chinese are the result of centuries of contact between the two rather than a common inheritance, and few scholars outside of China classify Hmong as a Sino-Tibetan language.

7 Another term for Mong Leng is Mong Njua, which means ‘Blue/Green Mong.’ We do not use that term here because some Mong Leng speakers consider the word njua derogatory. Although Mong Leng is commonly rendered in English as ‘Blue Hmong,’ the word leng does not mean blue. Thomas A. Lyman’s 1976 Dictionary of Mong Njua, a Miao (Meo) Language of Southeast Asia translates leng as ‘tendon, artery; cord; seam.’ The meaning of leng in the context of Mong Leng is unclear, however.

Mutual Intelligibility

For the most part, Hmong Der and Mong Leng speakers seem able to understand one another without much difficulty. There are numerous and systematic differences between the two, however, and some Hmong claim to have difficulty understanding speakers of the other dialect. Most of these differences lie in pronunciation, though words and even syntax sometimes differ also. One difference in pronunciation, for example, explains the difference in spelling between the words Hmong and Mong. Mong Leng speakers do not have the Hmong Der sound that is represented as hm in the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), the most common alphabet used to write the two dialects. (This sound, called a voiceless nasal does not exist in English; to produce it, close your lips as if to make the sound [m], but breathe out hard through your nose instead.) When Mong Leng speakers pronounce the word, the consonant is similar to the English sound [m].

Before the war in Laos, Hmong Der and Mong Leng speakers typically lived in separate villages, and speakers had more difficulty understanding one another than they do today, war and relocation having brought the two groups and their language varieties into close contact and familiarity with one another.

In the West, Hmong Der is the dialect that is most commonly used in public documents (e.g., Hmong community newsletters and translated U.S. government documents), educational materials (such as dictionaries and primers), and in Hmong language courses being taught at the secondary school level. While some Mong Leng seem to have accepted this situation as simply the way things are, others have protested what they consider discriminatory and unequal treatment. When providing the Hmong with written materials, service providers should be mindful of Mong Leng sentiments and consider translating the materials into both dialects.

The General Structure of Words

Words in Hmong Der and Mong Leng are generally of one syllable, though words with two or more syllables do exist. A typical word is made up of a consonant—or a blend of consonants—and a vowel or a diphthong (a combination of vowel sounds). Every syllable has a tone, signified in the RPA by a consonant at the end of the word.

A distinctive feature of Hmong Der and Mong Leng is the number of consonant sounds.

Sounds: Consonants, Vowels, and Tones

Consonants

A distinctive feature of Hmong Der and Mong Leng is the number of consonant sounds. Hmong Der has 36, and Mong Leng has 34. However, native speakers feel that what we call consonant clusters are actually single consonants, bringing the total number of consonants up to 58 in Hmong Der and 60 in Mong Leng. English, in contrast, has only 24. (Keep in mind that we are talking about sounds, not letters.)

Some of the consonant sounds in Hmong Der and Mong Leng are very similar to those found in English. For example, the consonants [f], [h], [l], and [y] in Hmong Der and Mong Leng sound very much like their English equivalents. Other sounds are somewhat different. For example, both Hmong Der and Mong Leng have a [t] that to an English speaker sounds sometimes like a [t] and sometimes like a [d]. The term in linguistics for this sound is a nonaspirated [t]—that is, a [t] without an accompanying puff of air. English has this kind of a [t] in words like still, but not at the beginning of words, as in Hmong Der and Mong Leng.

Other consonants in Hmong Der and Mong Leng have no equivalent in English. An example is [hn] as in hnab (‘bag’). To make this sound, raise your tongue to the roof of your mouth to make the sound [n], leave it there, and breathe out through your nose. Another consonant that does not appear in English is the sound written in RPA as r, which is quite unlike the English [r]; it is what linguists call a retroflex [t], and is made with the tongue curled back. A third Hmong Der/Mong Leng consonant exists in English but is not common. Written in RPA as a q, it is actually closer to an English [k], but made further back in the mouth. The technical term for this sound is uvular. While this sound is not common in English, it does occur in the speech of some native English speakers as a variant of [k] in words like caulk.

Of particular difficulty to the English speaker are consonant clusters that occur at the beginning of words in Hmong Der and Mong Leng. An example of this is the sound that is written in RPA as nplh and occurs in the word nplhaib (‘finger ring’). If you are able to put together the three sounds of [m], [p], and [l] into a single sound, you will approximate the pronunciation of that consonant cluster.

Vowels

In Hmong Der and Mong Leng, there are altogether six simple vowels, five diphthongs, and two or three nasal vowels (two in Hmong Der and three in Mong Leng). Most of the vowels in Hmong Der and Mong Leng also exist in English. One that does not is the vowel sound at the end of Hmong Der. There is no final [r] in Hmong; in the English spelling Hmong Der, it is a stand-in for a vowel that English does not have. To try to pronounce this vowel, make a [u] sound as in moon, and then, keeping everything inside your mouth the same, slowly un-round your lips.

Tones

Every word in Hmong Der and Mong Leng has one of seven tones,8 differing from one another mostly in pitch. For an English speaker, tones constitute the single most difficult aspect of Hmong Der and Mong Leng. In tone languages, the rise and fall of the voice—the pitch—is as much a part of a word as consonants and vowels are. In English, pitch is not irrelevant to meaning. When English speakers say Oh? with a rising pitch, they mean one thing; when they say Oh! with a falling pitch, they mean something else. But the word is essentially unchanged. In Hmong Der and Mong Leng, by contrast, each word has a tone attached to it that sets it apart from every other word. As Bruce Bliatout, Bruce Downing, and Judy Lewis explain in Handbook for Teaching Hmong-Speaking Students, “Just as map and mat and mad in English are different because the final consonants differ, so in Hmong ma with a high tone or mid tone or low tone is considered three different syllables with three different meanings.”

In other tone languages written in the Roman alphabet, tones are sometimes indicated with marks above the letters. This is the case with Vietnamese, for example. In the RPA, however, tones are indicated by consonants placed at the end of words. This system works because in Hmong Der and Mong Leng there are no consonants at the end of words, except an occasional –ng, which is indicated by a doubling of the vowel.

Thus, the word tib (‘to pile up’) is not pronounced with a final [–b] sound. Instead, the final consonant indicates that the syllable should be pronounced with a particular tone—in this case, a high level tone. The same syllable pronounced with a mid-level tone means ‘near, close to.’

The following table lists and describes the seven tones as they appear in seven words. To an English speaker, the words sound virtually the same, but to a Hmong Der or Mong Leng speaker, these are seven distinctive sounds and seven different words.

Table. Hmong Der and Mong Leng Tones

Note. The word list in this table was complied for this profile by Peter Yang, Director of the Wausau Area Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, Wausau, Wisconsin.

8 There is an eighth minor tone, which is a variant of one of the other seven.

Grammatical Structure

While English speakers who study Hmong Der and Mong Leng find the sound system difficult, they generally find the grammar relatively easy. This is because, in contrast to English, words in Hmong Der and Mong Leng do not change form. There are no suffixes, like English –s plurals or –ed past tenses or –ing participles. There are no noun declensions, as there are in French and Spanish. Nor is there grammatical gender; that is, there are no masculine or feminine nouns, although there are of course ways to indicate gender. And the form of a word does not change depending on its use in a sentence. An English speaker says, I love you and You love me: I changes to me when it comes after the verb. In Hmong Der and Mong Leng, however, the word for I (kuv in RPA) remains the same in both positions:

An interesting grammatical feature of Hmong Der and Mong Leng (as well as Chinese and many other Asian languages) is their use of classifiers. These are words that go between numerals and nouns. English has something similar with words like bar and piece in one bar of soap and a piece of cake, but the use of such words in English is optional, and their purpose is limited: They provide more precise information about the amount of the thing that is being discussed (for example, I don't want a piece of chocolate; I want a bar of chocolate). In Hmong Der and Mong Leng, in contrast, classifiers routinely appear before any noun that is preceded by a numeral. Whereas an English speaker says one house, a Hmong Der or Mong Leng speaker must place a classifier between one and house. Different classes of nouns take different classifiers. For tsev (‘house’), the classifier is lub:

An area of similarity between English and Hmong Der and Mong Leng is sentence structure. Like English, Hmong Der and Mong Leng sentence structure follows the basic SVO pattern—that is, subject-verb-object:

The structure of words within sentences, however, does not always follow the English pattern. Whereas in English adjectives precede the noun (big house), in Hmong Der and Mong Leng the adjective usually follows the noun, as it does in French and Spanish.

Hmong learners generally encounter
difficulty with the inflectional system of English.

Learning English

By looking at the differences between English and Hmong Der and Mong Leng, we can predict some of the areas of challenge that Hmong Der and Mong Leng speakers might encounter when they first begin to study English.

The basic subject-verb-object sentence pattern of English should not present problems to Hmong Der and Mong Leng speakers, since this is the pattern that prevails in their languages. Hmong learners, however, generally do encounter difficulty with the inflectional system of English—the various grammatical forms used to indicate (among other things) plural (girls, children), possessive (boy’s), pronoun cases (she, her, hers), and verb tenses (take, took, taken), none of which exists in Hmong Der and Mong Leng. For Hmong learners, the difficulty is compounded because inflectional changes in English often involve adding one or more consonants to the end of a word, and as we noted earlier, words in Hmong Der and Mong Leng almost always end in a vowel. Thus, a Hmong learner encounters difficulty with the word showed, not only because of the grammatical change from show to showed but also because of the consonant at the end of the word.

The Cultural Orientation Project--http://www.culturalorientation.net, for more information contact sanja@cal.org
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