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The Mizo language, or Mizo ṭawng, is spoken natively by the Mizo people in the Mizoram state of India, Chin State in Burma, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The language is also known as Lushai, a colonial term, as the Lushei people were the first to have external exposure. Though still common, Lushai (or Lusei, or Lushei) is considered incorrect by the Mizo themselves.[3] Much poetic language is derived from Pawi, Paite, and Hmar, and most known ancient poems considered to be in the Mizo language are actually in Pawi.[4]
The Mizo language belongs to the Kukish branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The numerous clans of the Mizo had respective dialects, amongst which the Lushei (Lusei, by Mizo themselves) dialect was most common, and which subsequently became the Mizo language and the lingua franca of the Kuki peoples due to its extensive and exclusive use by the Christian missionaries.
Christian missionaries[5] started developing an alphabet for the language by adapting the Hunterian system of transliteration. The 25 letters used for writing in Mizo language are:
A circumflex ^ was later added to the vowels to indicate long vowels, viz., â, ê, î, ô, û, which were insufficient to fully express Mizo tone. Recently, a leading newspaper in Mizoram, Vanglaini, the magazine Kristian Ṭhalai, and other publishers began using á, à, ä, é, è, ë, í, ì, ï, ó, ò, ú, ù, ü to indicate the long intonations and tones. However, this does not differentiate the different intonations that short tones can have.[6][7]
Mizo language is related to the other languages of the Sino-Tibetan family.[8] The Kukish languages (which native Mizo speakers call Zohnahthlâk ṭawngho/Mizo ṭawngho) have a substantial amount of words in common,[9] and Hmar and Mizo language are especially similar; they are close to being mutually intelligible at the spoken level, and they are mostly mutually intelligible at the poetic level.
The following table illustrates the similarity between Mizo ṭawng and some other members of the Sino-Tibetan family.[10] The words given are cognates, whose origins could be traced back to the proto-language Proto-Sino-Tibetan (given in the first column of the table).
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") hnih ("two") li ("four") nga ("five")
The vowel o has almost exactly the same sound as the diphthong in American English.
Mizo ṭawng has the following triphthongs:
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.
The eight tones and intonations that the vowel a (and the vowels aw, e, i, u, and this constitutes all the tones in the Mizo language) can have can be shown by the letter sequence p-a-n-g, as follows:[14]
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 de-stressed, and may eventually be reduced to prefixed consonants. The word nuntheihna ("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 bakhwan ("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").
However, even if one says Ka ziak lehkhabu, its meaning is not changed, nor does it become incorrect; the word order becomes Subject-verb-object. But this form is used only in particular situations.
The verbs (called thiltih in Mizo)[19] are not conjugated as in languages such as English and French by changing the desinence of words, but the tense (in a sentence) is clarified by the aspect and the addition of some particles, such as[20]
etc.
However, even if the spelling of a verb is not changed, its tone is sometimes changed. For example the verbs tum (to aim), hum (to protect) etc. change tones; the tone is lowered in the modified form. There is a third class of verbs - that of verbs which neither change tone nor are inflected (modified). Examples include hneh (to conquer), hnek (to strike with one's fist).
Modification of words is not restricted to verbs; adjectives, adverbs etc. are also modified.
There is no gender for nouns, and there are no articles. There are some specific suffixes for forming nouns from verbs and adjectives, the most common of which are -na and -zia. The suffix -na is used for forming nouns from both verbs and adjectives, whereas -zia is used specifically for nominalising adjectives. For example,
The free form is mostly used for emphasis, and has to be used in conjunction with either the clitic form or an appropriate pronominal particle, as shown in the following examples:
The clitic form is also used as a genitive form of the pronoun.
Thus we have to use double negation for such cases.
All kinds of Parts of Speech like noun, pronoun, verbs, etc. can be found in Mizo language with some additional unique kinds - post-positions and double adverbs.
The following is a sample text in Mizo of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:[23]
This award is only for books originally written in Mizo and not for translations, and it has been awarded every year since 1989. The award has been given to books on history and religion, but most of the winners are novels. Each year, the academy examines about a hundred books (in 2011, 149 books were examined),[25] out of which it selects the top 20, and then first shortlistling it further to top 10, and then to top 5, then top 3, finally chooses the winner.
The academy also awards lifetime achievement in Mizo literature.
Some of the most well-known Mizo writers include James Dokhuma, Ṭhuamtea Khawlhring, C. Laizawna, C. Lalnunchanga, Vanneihtluanga etc.
The Mizoram Press Information Bureau lists some twenty Mizo daily newspapers just in Aizawl city, as of March 2013.[26] The following list gives some of the most well-known newspapers published in Mizo language.
Most of them are daily newspapers.
There are around 700,000 speakers of Mizo language: 674,756 speakers in India (2001 census); 1,041 speakers in Bangladesh (1981 census); 12,500 speakers in Burma (1983 census).
Others:
Delhi, India, Rajasthan, Pakistan, Maharashtra
India, Aizawl, Assam, Manipur, Bangladesh
Indian English, Gujarati language, Kannada language, Kashmiri language, Nepali language
Icelandic language, Korean language, Armenian language, Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages
Mizoram, Myanmar, Champhai district, Aizawl, States and territories of India
Mizoram, Aizawl, India, Myanmar, Mizo language
Languages of India, Dogri language, Dravidian languages, Munda languages, Indian English
India, Bengali language, English language, Dravidian languages, Bangladesh
Tamil language, Hindi, Kannada language, Telugu language, English language