The Hmong people are an indigenous group in East and Southeast Asia. In China, the Hmong people are classified as a sub-group of the Miao people. The modern Hmong reside mainly in Southwest China and countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. There is also a very large diasporic community in the United States, comprising more than 300,000 Hmong. The Hmong diaspora also has smaller communities in Australia and South America.
The Miao are a group of linguistically-related peoples living in Southern China and Southeast Asia, who are recognized by the government of China as one of the 56 official ethnic groups. The Miao live primarily in southern China's mountains, in the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, Guangdong, and Hainan. Some sub-groups of the Miao, most notably the Hmong people, have migrated out of China into Southeast Asia. Following the communist takeover of Laos in 1975, a large group of Hmong refugees resettled in several Western nations, mainly in the United States, France, and Australia.
The Hmong–Mien languages are a highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia. They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, and Hubei provinces; the speakers of these languages are predominantly "hill people", in contrast to the neighboring Han Chinese, who have settled the more fertile river valleys.
Hmong or Mong is a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmongic languages spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Hainan, northern Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. There are some 2.7 million speakers of varieties that are largely mutually intelligible, including over 280,000 Hmong Americans as of 2013. Over half of all Hmong speakers speak the various dialects in China, where the Dananshan (大南山) dialect forms the basis of the standard language. However, Hmong Daw and Mong Leng are widely known only in Laos and the United States; Dananshan is more widely known in the native region of Hmong.
The lusheng is a Hmong musical instrument. It has a long history of 3000 years in China, traced back to the Tang Dynasty. It is a mouth organ with multiple bamboo pipes, each fitted with a free reed, which are fitted into a long blowing tube made of hardwood. It most often has five or six pipes of different pitches and is thus a polyphonic instrument. Its construction includes six parts. It comes in sizes ranging from very small to several meters in length.
The Pollard script, also known as Pollard Miao or Miao, is an abugida loosely based on the Latin alphabet and invented by Methodist missionary Sam Pollard. Pollard invented the script for use with A-Hmao, one of several Miao languages spoken in southeast Asia. The script underwent a series of revisions until 1936, when a translation of the New Testament was published using it.
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures is a 1997 book by Anne Fadiman that chronicles the struggles of a Hmong refugee family from Houaysouy, Sainyabuli Province, Laos, the Lees, and their interactions with the health care system in Merced, California. In 2005 Robert Entenmann, of St. Olaf College wrote that the book is "certainly the most widely read book on the Hmong experience in America."
The Hmong People society originally from Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and southeast China. As of 2011 the worldwide Hmong population is about four million. The Hmong culture is patrilineal, allowing a husband's family to make all major decisions, even when they solely concern the woman. However, the Hmong women have traditionally carried a large amount of responsibility and some power due to their necessary contribution of food and labor to the family.
The Hmongic languages, also known as Miao languages, include the various languages spoken by the Miao people. Hmongic languages also include various languages spoken by non-Mienic-speaking Yao people, such as Pa-Hng, Bunu, Jiongnai, Younuo, and others, while She is spoken by ethnic She people.
The Hin Heup massacre was the massacre of 14 Hmong civilians at Hin Heup bridge by Pathet Lao troops.
Martha Ratliff is an American linguist and Professor Emerita at Wayne State University. She is a leading specialist in Hmong–Mien languages and also notable for her reconstruction of Proto-Hmong–Mien.
Mang is an Austroasiatic language of Vietnam, China, and Laos. It is spoken mainly in Lai Châu Province, Vietnam and across the border in Jinping County, China. It was first documented only in 1974.
The A-Hmao language, also known as Large Flowery Miao or Northeast Yunnan Miao, is a Hmongic language spoken in China. It is the language the Pollard script was designed for, and displays extensive tone sandhi. There is a high degree of literacy in Pollard among the older generation.
Luobohe Miao, also known as Hmjo or A-Hmyo, is a Miao language of China.
Mang, or Mashan Miao also known as Mashan Hmong, 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.
Kev Dab Kev Qhuas is the common ethnic religion of the Miao people, best translated as the "practice of spirituality". The religion is also called Hmongism by a Hmong American church established in 2012 to organize it among Hmong people in the United States.
Sonom was a chieftain of the rGyalrong people in China. He was the lord-lama of Greater Jinchuan. He was executed after his January 1776 defeat in the Jinchuan campaigns.
Histoire des Miao is a 1924 ethnographic book of the Hmong people by François Marie Savina, published by the Société des Missions-Etrangères de Paris. As of 2006, of Savina's writings, it is the most well-known and the most often cited. The book includes Savina's theories and views of the Hmong. Savina argued that the Hmong had non-Asian origins because their legends had similarities to European stories.
François Marie Savina was a Frenchman who worked as a Catholic priest and as an anthropologist. For an approximately forty-year period he worked in the Upper-Tonkin Vicariate, Hainan, and Laos. He studied the Hmong people of northern Vietnam and Laos as he was asked to spread Christianity to them. Nicholas Tapp, author of The Impossibility of Self: An Essay on the Hmong Diaspora, described Savina as "One of our earliest informants who is at all frank about the nature of his day-today encounters with the Hmong". Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, wrote that Savina was "[t]he most notable" missionary ethnographer of Southeast Asia of his era.
