Mizo and Sino-Tibetan languages

The following table illustrates the similarity between Mizo and other members of the Sino-Tibetan family.^[13] The words given are cognates, whose origins could be traced back to the proto-language Proto-Sino-Tibetan (given in the first column of the table).

References for the above table:^[14][15]

Vowels

Consonants

Mizo has the following consonants, with the first symbol being its orthographical form and the second one its representation in the IPA:^[16]

1. The glottal and glottalised consonants appear only in final position.

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 and intonations that the vowel a (and the vowels aw, e, i, u, and this constitutes all the tones in the Mizo language) can have are shown by the letter sequence p-a-n-g, as follows:^[17]

• long high tone: páng as in páng là (which has the same intonation as sáng in the sentence Thingküng sáng tak kan huanah a ding).
• long low tone: pàng as in Tui a kawt pàng pâng mai (which has the same intonation as vàng in the word vànglaini).
• peaking tone: pâng as in Tui a kawt pàng pâng mai (which has the same intonation as thlûk in I hla phuah thlûk chu a va mawi ve).
• dipping tone: päng as in Tuibur a hmuam päng mai (which has the same intonation as säm in Kan huan ka säm vêl mai mai).
• short rising tone: pǎng as in naupǎng (which has the same intonation as thǎng in Kan huanah thǎng ka kam).
• short falling tone: pȧng as in I va inkhuih pȧng ve? (which has the same intonation as pȧn in I lam ka rawn pȧn )
• short mid tone: pang as in A dik lo nghâl pang (which has the same tone as man in Sazu ka man )
• short low tone: pạng as in I pạng a sá a nih kha (which has the same tone as chạl in I chạlah thosí a fù ).

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 versus short tones using the circumflex. As well, the need of at least 7 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, 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 4 (those used now for the long tones) on only two dead keys.

Sample sentences

The following table illustrates the pronunciations of various consonants, vowels and diphthongs found in the Mizo language:

References and further reading for this section.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Verbs

Nouns

Pronouns

Negation

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

Some Mizo words and phrases

Cardinal numbers

Books

Mizo has a thriving literature with Mizo departments in Mizoram University and Manipur University . The governing body is the Mizo Academy of Letters, which awards the annual literary prize MAL Book of the Year since 1989. The books awarded so far and their authors are tabulated below along with the years:^[12]

This award is only for books originally written in Mizo, not for translations, and it has been awarded every year since 1989. The award has been given to books on history and religion, but most of its winners are novels. Each year, the academy examines about 100 books (in 2011, 149 books were examined),^[28]

Newspaper

The Mizoram Press Information Bureau lists some twenty Mizo daily newspapers just in Aizawl city, as of March 2013.^[29] The following list gives some of the most well-known newspapers published in the Mizo language.

Most of them are daily newspapers.