Hakha Chin language
| Hakha Chin | |
|---|---|
| Laiholh | |
| Native to | Burma, India, Bangladesh |
| Ethnicity | Chin |
|
Native speakers
|
(130,000 cited 1991–2001) |
|
Sino-Tibetan
|
|
| Latin script (Hakha alphabet),Burmese script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | haka1240 |
Hakha Chin (Baungshe, Pawi), or Lai, is a language spoken in Southeast Asia by 446,264 people. The total figure includes 2,000 Zokhua and 60,100 Lai speakers. The speakers are largely concentrated in Chin State in western Burma and Mizoram in eastern India, with a small number of speakers in southeastern Bangladesh.
The Hakha-Chin language acts as a lingua franca in most parts of Chin State and is a native language in Hakha, Thantlang, and parts of Matupi. Derived from the same Lai dialect and sharing 85% of their phonology, Hakha speakers can easily communicate with Falam speakers. As the capital of Chin State, Hakha provides government employment and business opportunities to people living elsewhere in Chin State. These people live here temporarily or permanently, and their families eventually learn how to speak Hakha.
Words in the Hakha Chin language are predominantly monosyllabic with some sesquisyllables featuring a "reduced syllable". Full syllables are either open or closed with a rising, falling, or low tone.
The Hakha Chin language differentiates between voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated obstruents. Additionally, two sets of sonorants are realised.
Consonants allowed in syllable codas are /p, t, k, m, n, ŋ, l, r, j, w/.
The unattested parent language, Proto-Chin, featured a voiced velar plosive ɡ. The phoneme itself was lost in all of its daughter languages, due to a spirantisation to ɣ, which a labialisation followed afterwards. Only certain loanwords, not native words, have the voiced velar plosive.
In the Hakha alphabet, ⟨h⟩ transcribes the glottal fricative in initial position, but a glottal stop in coda position. Voiceless approximants are distinguished in writing from their voiced counterparts with a prefixed ⟨h⟩.
The Hakha language features five vowels which may be long or short. Allophones occur for closed syllables.
The Hakha language also features diphthongs.
Hakha-Chin is a subject-object-verb (SOV) language, and negation follows the verb.
Literacy rates are lower for older generations and higher in younger generations. The Hakha-Chin language uses the Latin script and reportedly the Pau Cin Hau script, unlike most languages of India and Bangladesh which use Devanagari or other Southeast Asian alphabets. Between 1978 and 1999, the Bible was translated into the language.
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