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20-479: The people are said to have come from hunters that would move from place to place at times. The language is notable for only being discovered by linguists in 1991. Currently, George van Driem is working towards the completion of a description of Gongduk based on his work with native speakers in the Gongduk area. Gongduk has complex verbal morphology, which Ethnologue considers a retention from Proto-Tibeto-Burman , and

40-690: A highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia . They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou , Hunan , Yunnan , Sichuan , Guangxi , Guangdong and Hubei provinces; the speakers of these languages are predominantly " hill people ", in contrast to the neighboring Han Chinese , who have settled the more fertile river valleys. Hmongic (Miao) and Mienic (Yao) are closely related, but clearly distinct. For internal classifications, see Hmongic languages and Mienic languages . The largest differences are due to divergent developments in their phonological systems . The Hmongic languages appear to have kept

60-841: A programme named Languages and Genes of the Greater Himalayan Region , conducted in collaboration with the Government of Nepal and the Royal Government of Bhutan, he collected DNA from many indigenous peoples of the Himalayas. In Bern, George van Driem currently runs the research programme Strategische Zielsetzungen im Subkontinent (Strategic Objectives in the Subcontinent), which aims to analyse and describe endangered and poorly documented languages in South Asia. This programme of research

80-458: A survey of the language communities of the kingdom. He and native Dzongkha speaker Karma Tshering co-authored the authoritative textbook on Dzongkha. Van Driem wrote grammars of Limbu and Dumi , Kiranti languages spoken in eastern Nepal, and the Bumthang language of central Bhutan. He authored Languages of the Himalayas, a two-volume ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan region. Under

100-490: Is a Dutch professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Bern . He studied East Asian languages and is known for the father tongue hypothesis . George van Driem has conducted field research in the Himalayas since 1983. He was commissioned by the Royal Government of Bhutan to codify a grammar of Dzongkha , the national language, design a phonological romanisation for the language known as Roman Dzongkha, and complete

120-535: Is effectively a diversification of the Himalayan Languages Project , which he directed at Leiden University, where he held the chair of Descriptive Linguistics until 2009. He and his research team have documented over a dozen endangered languages of the greater Himalayan region, producing analytical grammars and lexica and recording morphologically analysed native texts. His interdisciplinary research in collaboration with geneticists has led to advances in

140-585: Is lexically highly divergent. On this basis, it is apparently not part of any major subgroup and will probably have to be assigned to its own branch. George van Driem (2001:870) proposes that the Greater Bumthang ( East Bodish ) languages, including Bumthang , Khengkha , and Kurtöp , may have a Gongduk substratum. Gongduk itself may also have a non-Tibeto-Burman substrate. Gerber (2018) notes that Gongduk has had extensive contact with Black Mountain Mönpa before

160-675: Is quite typical of the region. They are SVO in word order but are not as rigidly right-branching as the Tai–Kadai languages or most Mon–Khmer languages , since they have genitives and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in adpositions : serial verb constructions replace most functions of adpositions in languages like English. For example, a construction translating as "be near" would be used where in English prepositions like "in" or "at" would be used. Besides their tonality and lack of adpositions, another striking feature

180-552: Is that they constitute a family of their own, the lexical and typological similarities among Hmong–Mien and Sinitic languages being attributed to contact-induced influence. Paul K. Benedict , an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Hmong–Mien languages. The hypothesis never received much acceptance for Hmong–Mien, however. Kosaka (2002) argued specifically for a Miao– Dai family. The most likely homeland of

200-437: The ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous. Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong–Mien languages tend to be monosyllabic and syntactically analytic . They are some of the most highly tonal languages in the world: Longmo and Zongdi Hmong have as many as twelve distinct tones. They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of voiceless sonorants and uvular consonants ; otherwise their phonology

220-513: The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), an experimental algorithm for automatic generation of phonologically based phylogenies. The Mandarin names for these languages are Miáo and Yáo . In Vietnamese , the name for Hmong is H'Mông , and the name for Mien is Dao (i.e., Yao), although Miền is also used. Meo , Hmu , Mong , Hmao , and Hmong are local names for Miao, but since most Laotian refugees in

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240-601: The Hmong–Mien languages is in Southern China between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages might have migrated from Central China either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han Chinese. Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place during the 17th century (1600–1700). Ancient DNA evidence suggests that

260-628: The United States call themselves Hmong/Mong , this name has become better known in English than the others in recent decades. However, except for some scholars who prefer the word, the term 'Hmong/Mong' is only used within certain Hmong/Miao language speaking communities in China, where the majority of the Miao speakers live. In Mandarin, despite the fact that it was once a derogatory term, the word Miao (Chinese: 苗;

280-734: The ancestors of the speakers of the Hmong–Mien languages were a population genetically distinct from that of the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language source populations at a location on the Yangtze River . Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports the proposition that people who speak the Hmong–Mien languages are descended from a population that is distantly related to those who now speak the Mon-Khmer languages. The date of Proto-Hmong–Mien has been estimated to be about 2500 BP (500 BC) by Sagart, Blench, and Sanchez-Mazas using traditional methods employing many lines of evidence, and about 4243 BP (2250 BC) by

300-456: The arrival of East Bodish languages in Bhutan . Gongduk also has many Tshangla loanwords. The following comparative vocabulary table from Gerber (2020) compares Gongduk, Black Mountain Mönpa , and Bjokapakha, which is a divergent Tshangla variety. Gongduk has productive suffixal morphology (van Driem 2014). Examples: However, non-human plural nouns do not take on any suffixes, and remain

320-553: The large set of initial consonants featured in the protolanguage but greatly reduced the distinctions in the syllable finals, in particular losing all glides and stop codas . The Mienic languages, on the other hand, have largely preserved syllable finals but reduced the number of initial consonants. Early linguistic classifications placed the Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan family , where they remain in many Chinese classifications. The current consensus among Western linguists

340-596: The reconstruction of Asian ethnolinguistic prehistory. Based on linguistic palaeontology, ethnolinguistic phylogeography, rice genetics and the Holocene distribution of faunal species, he identified the ancient Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatics as the first domesticators of Asian rice and published a theory on the homelands and prehistoric dispersal of the Hmong-Mien , Austroasiatic and Trans-Himalayan linguistic phyla. His historical linguistic work on linguistic phylogeny has replaced

360-552: The same: Examples: Examples: Examples: Gongduk demonstratives precede head nouns. Examples: van Driem (2014) compares the Gongduk first person singular personal pronoun ðə 'I, me' to Kathmandu Newar dʑiː ~ dʑĩ - 'I, me' and Tshangla dʑaŋ ~ dʑi - ~ dʑiŋ - 'I, me'. He also compares the Gongduk first person plural personal pronoun ðiŋ 'we, us' to Kathmandu Newar dʑʰai ~ dʑʰĩ - 'we, us'. The Gongduk words and phrases below are from van Driem (2014). George van Driem George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957)

380-541: The tone varies according to the Sinitic dialect) is now commonly used by members of all nationalities to refer to the language and the ethnolinguistic group. The Mandarin name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality , which is a multicultural rather than ethnolinguistic group. It includes peoples speaking Mien, Kra–Dai , Yi , and Miao languages, the latter called Bùnǔ rather than Miáo when spoken by Yao. For this reason,

400-458: The unsupported Sino-Tibetan hypothesis with the older, more agnostic Tibeto-Burman phylogenetic model, for which he proposed the neutral geographical name Trans-Himalayan in 2004. He developed the Darwinian theory of language known as Symbiosism , and he is author of the philosophy of Symbiomism. Hmong-Mien The Hmong–Mien languages (also known as Miao–Yao and rarely as Yangtzean ) are

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