Mizo is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Mizoram, where it is the official language and lingua franca. It is the mother tongue of the Mizo people and some members of the Mizo diaspora. Other than Mizoram, it is also spoken in Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura, and Assam states of India, Sagaing Region and Chin State in Myanmar, and Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. It is mainly based on the Lusei dialect but it has also derived many words from its surrounding Mizo clans. The language is also known as Duhlian and Lushai, a colonial term, as the Duhlian people were the first among the Mizo people to be encountered by the British in the course of their colonial expansion.

Classification

Mizo is related to the other languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Kuki-Chin-Mizo languages (which native Mizo speakers call Zohnahthlâk ṭawngho/Mizo ṭawngho) have a substantial number of words in common.

Phonology

Vowels

Monophthongs

Mizo has eight tones and intonations for each of the vowels a, aw, e, i and u, four of which are reduced tones and the other four long tones. The vowel o has only three tones, all of them of the reduced type. The vowels can be represented as follows:

Diphthongs

Triphthongs

Mizo has the following triphthongs:

Consonants

Mizo has the following consonants, with the first symbol being its orthographical form and the second one its representation in the IPA:

Tone

As Mizo is a tonal language, differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words. Tone systems have developed independently in many daughter languages, largely by 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, and falling and rising tones developed from syllable-final h and glottal stop, which themselves often reflect earlier consonants. The eight tones a****nd inton****ations that the vowel a (a****nd the vowels aw, e, i, u, which constitutes all the tones in Mizo) ca****n have are shown by the letter sequence p-a-n-g, as follows: Note that the exact orthography of tones with diacritics is still not standardised (notably for differentiating the four short tones with confusive or conflicting choices of diacritics) except for the differentiation of long tones by using the circumflex from short tones. As well, the need of at least seven diacritics may cause complications to design easy keyboard layouts, even if they use dead keys and even if not all basic Latin letters are needed for Mizo itself, and so publications may represent the short tones using digrams (e.g. by appending some apostrophe or glottal letter) to reduce the number of diacritics needed to only four (those used now for the long tones) on only two dead keys.

Grammar

Verbs

Conjugation

In Mizo verb tense is indicated by the aspect and the addition of particles, such as:

Modification of verbs

Mizo gerunds and past participles are formed by a change in word ending called tihdanglamna.

Nouns

Mizo nouns undergo declension into cases. Nouns are pluralised by suffixing -te, -ho, -teho or -hote.

Pronouns

All Mizo pronouns occur in two forms, namely in free form and clitic form and are declined into cases.

Negation

For declarative sentences, negation is achieved by adding the particle lo (not) at the end of a sentence:

Cardinal numbers

Writing system

The Mizo alphabet is based on the Roman alphabet and has 25 letters. In its current form, it was devised by the first Christian missionaries of Mizoram, J. H. Lorrain and F. W. Savidge, based on the Hunterian system of transliteration. 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, Ö, Ú, Ù, Ü to indicate the long intonations and tones. However, this does not differentiate the different intonations that short tones can have.

Sample texts

The following is a sample text in Mizo of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Literature

Mizo has a thriving literature, which has both written and oral traditions. It has undergone a considerable change in the 20th century. The Mizoram Press Information Bureau lists some twenty Mizo daily newspapers just in Aizawl city, as of March 2013.

Notelist

Sources