West Hmongic


The West Hmongic languages, also known as Chuanqiandian Miao and Western Miao, is the major branch of the Hmongic languages of China and Southeast Asia.
The name Chuanqiandian is used both for West Hmongic as a whole and for one of its branches, the Chuanqiandian cluster Hmong.

Writing

The Miao languages were traditionally written with various adaptations of Chinese characters. Around 1905, Samuel Pollard introduced a Romanized script, the Pollard script, for the A-Hmao language, and this came to be used for Hmong Daw as well. In the United States, the Romanized Popular Alphabet is often used for White and Green Hmong. In China, pinyin-based Latin alphabets have been devised for Chuanqiandian and A-Hmao. Wu and Yang report attempts at writing Mashan in 1985 and an improvement by them; they recommend that standards should be developed for each of the six other primary varieties of West Hmongic.

Autonyms

Autonyms include :
West Hmongic is the most diverse branch of the Hmong language family. There are nine primary branches in Chinese sources, though the unity of these are not accepted in all Western sources. Items marked "§" have been split into individual languages by either Matisoff or Strecker; all of these are branches of Miao listed with subbranches in Chinese sources. The other three are not so divided in either Chinese or Western sources.
The three divisions of the Chuanqiandian cluster are only as divergent as the divisions of the other branches marked "§", but are listed separately due to the internal complexity of Hmong.
The various varieties of Pingtang, new branches of Guiyang and Mashan, and Matisoff's Raojia and Pa Na are not listed in Ethnologue 16, and have no ISO codes. Matisoff gives very different names, and it's not clear how these correspond to the branches listed here.

Ratliff (2010)

Ratliff includes three languages specifically:
The last contradicts Matisoff, who had posited a Bunu branch of Hmongic with Bu-Nao in it, but recapitulates Strecker. The other Western varieties were not addressed, though some were included in her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.

Wang (1985)

Wang Fushi groups the Western Miao languages into eight primary divisions. Datapoint locations of representative dialects are from Li Yunbing, all of which are located in Guizhou province, China.
The above classification was later revised by Li Jinping & Li Tianyi to include 7 dialects instead of the 8 given in Wang ; Pingtang Miao is excluded.
Li Yunbing classified those varieties left unclassified in Wang, grouping four of them together as an eighth branch of West Hmongic, Pingtang. He identified Luodian Muyin and Wangmo as varieties of Mashan. Wang had already established Qianxi and Ziyun as varieties of Guiyang. This classification is repeated in Wu and Yang :
The varieties analyzed by Li Yunbing are:
Li considers of Heba, Majiang County 麻江县河坝乡 to be a separate dialect of Hmu. It has 5,000 speakers in Majiang County, and 10,000 speakers total
Bu-Nao may not be included simply because speakers are ethnically Yao rather than Miao.

Mortensen (2004)

David Mortensen argues for the following classification of Western Hmongic based on shared tonal innovations, including tone sandhi. Pingtang, Luobohe, and Chong'anjiang are not addressed.
;Western Hmongic
Castro & Gu divide the Hmong dialects of Wenshan Prefecture, Yunnan into four subdivisions, listed from east to west.
The dialects given above are named after the groups they are spoken by. Some townships where they are spoken in are given as well.
Castro, Flaming, & Luo found that there are 4 different West Hmongic languages in Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan.
Castro, Flaming, & Luo propose the following classification for the Western Miao dialects of southeastern Yunnan, which is based on Michael Johnson's 1998 classification of Western Miao dialects.
;Western Miao
2006 outlined the following. Not all languages are necessarily listed.
Western Hmong
Matisoff 2001 removed Bu-Nao from Strecker, broke up several of the remaining groups, and does not mention the unclassified languages, unless they are covered by Raojia or Pa Na. Apart from those, this is basically the classification of Ethnologue 16.
;Chuanqiangdian Miao
Wang, summarized in English in Strecker 1987 emphasized the diversity of Western Hmongic. The names below are from Strecker; Wang did not assign names, but identified the districts where the varieties were spoken.
Chuanqiandian
These are not all established as unitary branches, however. In a follow-up to that paper in the same publication, Strecker broke up Bu-Nao on the basis of newly accessible data, and noted that several of the languages listed in Wang were unclassified due to lack of data, and had not been demonstrated to be West Hmongic.
The other groups are then listed as unclassified within Hmongic, and not specifically West Hmongic. However, Wang identified two as varieties of Guiyang.
The eight unclassified languages are all spoken in a small area of south-central Guizhou, along with Guiyang, Huishui, Mashan, and Luobo River Miao. These were later addressed by Li Yunbing.