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Mashan Miao language

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Mashan Miao language

Mang, or Mashan Miao also known as Mashan Hmong (麻山 máshān), is a Miao language of China, spoken primarily in Ziyun Miao and Buyei Autonomous County, southwestern Guizhou province, southwest China. The endonym is Mang, similar to other West Hmongic languages such as Mong.

Mang was classified as a branch of Western Hmongic in Wang (1985), who listed four varieties. Matisoff (2001) gave these four varieties the status of separate languages, and, conservatively, did not retain them as a single group within West Hmongic. Li Yunbing (2000) added two minor varieties which had been left unclassified in Wang, Southeastern (Strecker's "Luodian Muyin") and Southwestern ("Wangmo").

Below is a list of Miao dialects and their respective speaker populations and distributions from Li (2018), along with representative datapoints from Wang (1985).

According to Sun (2017), the central dialect of Mashan Miao is spoken in the following locations by a total of approximately 50,000 speakers.

A pinyin alphabet had been created for Mang in 1985, but proved to have deficiencies. Wu and Yang (2010) report the creation of a new alphabet, albeit a tentative one, based on the Central Mang dialect of Ziyun County, Zōngdì 宗地 township, Dàdìbà 大地坝 village.

Consonants, in pinyin, are:

The Latin voiced/voiceless opposition has been coopted to indicate aspiration, as usual in pinyin alphabets.

Correspondences between Central Mang dialects include Dadiba retroflex dr, tr with dental z, c in another village of the same Zongdi township, Sanjiao (三脚 Sānjiǎo). The other five varieties of Mang have more palatalized initials than Central Mang, though these can be transcribed as medial -i-. The onsets by, py, nby, my are pronounced [pʐ pʰʐ mpʐ mʐ ] in Central Mang and [pj pʰj mpj mj] in the other five Mang varieties.

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