Tedim language
The Tedim language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mostly in the southern Indo-Burmese border. It is the native language of the Tedim tribe of the Zomi people, and a form of standardized dialect merging from the Sukte and Kamhau dialects. It is a subject-object verb language, and negation follows the verb. It is mutually intelligible with the Paite language.
Tedim Tedim Chin | |
---|---|
Zopau, Tedim pau, Paite pau, Zomi | |
Native to | Myanmar, India |
Region | Chin State and Sagaing Division of Myanmar Manipur State and Mizoram State of India |
Ethnicity | Zomi people, Chin people |
Native speakers | (340,000 cited 1990)[1] |
Sino-Tibetan
| |
Latin Pau Cin Hau script | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | ctd |
Glottolog | tedi1235 |
ELP | Tiddim Chin |
Clans
Sukte is a small Zomi clan. They generally live in the Tedim,Tonzang, and Kalay townships. "But there is no specific native language of Sukte. It is just a clan of Zomi." Zam Ngaih Cing (2011:170) lists some Zomi varieties as Losau, Sihzang, Teizang, Saizang, Dim, Khuano, Hualngo, Dim, Zou, Thado, Paite and Vangteh.[2]
History
Zomi was the primary language spoken by Pau Cin Hau, a religious leader who lived from 1859 to 1948. He also devised a logographic and later simplified alphabetic script for writing materials in Zomi.
Phonology
The phonology of Zomi can be described as (C)V(V)(C)T order, where C represents a consonant, V represents a vowel, T represents a tone, and parentheses enclose optional constituents of a syllable.[3]
Consonants
Labial | Alveolar | Alveolo- palatal |
Velar | Glottal | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Plosive/ Affricate |
voiceless | p | t | tɕ | k | ʔ |
aspirated | pʰ | tʰ | tɕʰ | (kʰ) | ||
voiced | b | d | ɡ | |||
Fricative | voiceless | f | s | x | h | |
voiced | v | z | ||||
Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
Approximant | l | lˀ |
- Approximants [j, w] can be heard as allophones of vowels /i̯, u̯/ within diphthongs.
- /x/ can also be heard as an aspirated velar stop [kʰ] in free variation.
References
- Tedim
Tedim Chin at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required) - "But there is no language of Sukte, meaning it is only a clan of Zomi." Source: Cing, Zam Ngaih. "Linguistic Ecology of Tedim Chin." In Singh, Shailendra Kumar (ed). Linguistic Ecology of Manipur. Guwahati: EBH Publishers.
- "Proposal to Encode the Pau Cin Hau Alphabet in ISO/IEC 10646" (PDF). unicode.org. Retrieved 15 September 2023.
- Otsuka, Kosei (2014). Tiddim Chin. Toshihide Nakayama and Noboru Yoshioka and Kosei Otsuka (eds.), Grammatical Sketches from the Field: Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. pp. 109–141.