1. Family: Hmong-Mien
  2. Genus: Hmong-Mien

Mien

WALS coordinates: 25° N, 111° E

spoken in China

Alternative Names

Ethnologue:
Ruhlen:
  • Mien
Routledge:
  • Yao
Other:
  • Man,
  • Highland Yao,
  • Mien,
  • Mjen
ISO 639-3:

Features

Feature Value References
Phonology
Consonant Inventories Moderately large
Vowel Quality Inventories Large (7-14)
Consonant-Vowel Ratio Moderately high
Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives In plosives alone
Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems None missing in /p t k b d g/
Uvular Consonants None
Glottalized Consonants No glottalized consonants
Lateral Consonants /l/, no obstruent laterals
Front Rounded Vowels None
Tone Complex tone system
Absence of Common Consonants All present
Presence of Uncommon Consonants None
Morphology
Prefixing vs. Suffixing in Inflectional Morphology Little affixation
Nominal Categories
Coding of Nominal Plurality No plural
Position of Case Affixes No case affixes or adpositional clitics
Verbal Categories
Position of Tense-Aspect Affixes No tense-aspect inflection
Situational Possibility Verbal constructions
Epistemic Possibility Other
Overlap between Situational and Epistemic Modal Marking No overlap
Word Order
Order of Subject, Object and Verb SVO
Order of Subject and Verb SV
Order of Object and Verb VO
Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase No adpositions
Order of Genitive and Noun Genitive-Noun
Order of Adjective and Noun Noun-Adjective
Order of Demonstrative and Noun Demonstrative-Noun
Order of Numeral and Noun Numeral-Noun
Order of Degree Word and Adjective Adjective-Degree word
Position of Polar Question Particles Final
Position of Interrogative Phrases in Content Questions Not initial interrogative phrase
Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Adjective and Noun VO and NAdj
Simple Clauses
Negative Morphemes Negative word, unclear if verb or particle
Polar Questions Question particle
Predicative Adjectives Verbal encoding
Nominal and Locational Predication Different
Zero Copula for Predicate Nominals Possible