Hmong Daw (White Hmong) Alphabet

Hmong Daw, White Hmong, is Hmoob Dawb in its own spelling. Most White Hmong who write today use the Romanized Popular Alphabet, RPA, made in Laos between 1951 and 1953 by the missionaries Yves Bertrais, William Smalley and Linwood Barney, working with Hmong speakers. RPA takes the 26 letters of the English alphabet and adds no accents at all, so any keyboard or phone writes it. The trick is that the letters do new jobs.

Among the consonants, an h after a letter adds a puff of breath (ph, th, kh, qh, tsh, txh), and an n in front of a stop starts it with a nasal (np, nt, nk, nq, nts, ntx). x is the English s, s is close to English sh, q is a k made deeper in the throat, and r is a t said with the tongue curled back. White Hmong has voiceless nasals written with h first, hm, hn, hny and hl, and the people's own name begins with one: Hmoob. Green Hmong has no such sounds and says Moob.

There are 13 vowels: a, e, i, o, u and w, a vowel between i and u; the doubled ee and oo, which are nasal, so Hmoob sounds close to English Hmong; and the diphthongs ai, au, aw, ia and ua.

White Hmong tones: the tone letters b, j, v, s, g, m, d

Hmong is a tone language with eight tones, and the tone is often the only difference between two words. RPA writes it with a letter at the end of the syllable that is never pronounced: b high, j high falling, v mid rising, no letter for the mid tone, s low, g low and breathy, m low and creaky, and d, a low rising variant of the m tone heard at the end of a phrase.

The classic set is pob (ball), poj (female), pov (to throw), po (spleen), pos (thorn), pog (grandmother) and pom (to see). Because Hmong has no phonemic syllable-final consonants, the last letter of an RPA word is either a vowel or a tone letter. At the start of a word, d, m, s and v are ordinary consonants again: in dej, water, the d is said and the j is the high falling tone. Green Hmong says dlej; Hmong Njua has a collection of its own.

Pahawh Hmong, the Hmong script 𖬀 𖬜 𖬰

Pahawh Hmong was created in 1959 by Shong Lue Yang (Soob Lwj Yaj), a farmer from the hills along the border of Laos and Vietnam who had never learned to read. His followers call him Niam Ntawv, Mother of Writing, and hold that the script was revealed to him. He revised it in several stages before he was killed in 1971. The script serves both White and Green Hmong, and its later form came into Unicode 7.0 in 2014 as the block U+16B00 to U+16B8F, 127 characters, all of them on this page.

Each syllable is written with two letters, a vowel letter for the rime and a consonant letter for the onset, and the vowel is written first even though it is spoken second. The 28 vowel letters come in pairs named with a dummy k and the tone letters b and v: 𖬀 keeb and 𖬁 keev, 𖬂 kib and 𖬃 kiv. Seven combining marks, from 𖬰 cim tub to 𖬶 cim taum, change the tone on vowel letters; cim tub and cim hom also change the sound of consonants, from 𖬜 vau to 𖬯 cau.

Pahawh also has its own digits 𖭐 to 𖭙, signs for tens, hundreds and on up to trillions, punctuation such as 𖬸 vos tshab ceeb, the exclamation mark, signs for whole words such as 𖭤 xyoo (year), 𖭥 hli (month) and 𖭨 hnub (day), and the clan signs.

Hmong clan symbols in Pahawh

Every Hmong person belongs to a clan, carried as the family name, and people traditionally marry outside their own clan. Pahawh Hmong has a sign for each clan name, and Unicode encodes 19 of them, from 𖭽 Tsheej to 𖮏 Vwj. In RPA the names are spelled with their tone letters, and English spellings differ: 𖮊 Vaj is Vang, 𖮌 Yaj Yang, 𖮁 Xyooj Xiong, 𖭿 Lis Lee, 𖮅 Thoj Thao, 𖮃 Hawj Her, 𖮄 Muas Moua and 𖮀 Lauj Lor.

These are the characters to copy for anyone looking for Hmong clan symbols: paste the sign next to a family name in a profile, an invitation or a family tree, and it shows on any device with a Pahawh font.

How to type White Hmong in RPA and Pahawh

RPA needs nothing special: White Hmong is typed on any keyboard, and on a phone it is enough to switch off English autocorrect, which keeps trying to change words like koj and nyob. Pahawh Hmong is different. Few devices have a keyboard for it, so the simplest way is to copy the letters from the grid; people who write it often install a third-party layout. A font is needed to see it, such as the free Noto Sans Pahawh Hmong; empty boxes mean the device has none.

In a web page each character can be written as a code: 𖬀 gives 𖬀 keeb and 𖭽 the clan sign 𖭽 Tsheej. The whole block lies outside Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, so each character takes four bytes in UTF-8. CLDR, Unicode's locale data, also lists a third script for Hmong Daw: Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong, created in the United States in the 1980s by the Reverend Chervang Kong Vang. Its letters, 𞄀 ma to 𞄬 w, are collected on the Hmong Njua page.

Where Hmong Daw is spoken

CLDR estimates about 2.2 million speakers of Hmong Daw: about 1.5 million in Vietnam, about 240,000 in China, about 230,000 in the United States, about 180,000 in Laos and about 33,000 in Thailand, with a smaller community of about 10,000 in France. Many Hmong families in the United States and France came as refugees from Laos after 1975, and there are large Hmong communities in Minnesota, California and Wisconsin.

White Hmong and Green Hmong (Hmong Njua) are dialects of one language and their speakers understand each other. For the countries, see the Vietnam, China, United States, Laos, Thailand and France collections; the Lao and Vietnamese collections cover the national languages many Hmong speak as well.