Tedim language

Tedim
Tedim
Tedim Chin
Zopau, Tedim 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)
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Kuki-Chin Northeastern Chin Tedim; ; ; ;
Writing system	Latin ; Pau Cin Hau script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ctd
Glottolog	tedi1235
ELP	Tiddim Chin

Last updated September 21, 2025

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.

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.^[2]

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
Fricative	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.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i iː		u uː
Mid	ɛ ɛː		ɔ ɔː
Open		a aː

Diphthongs
	Front	Central	Back
Close	iu̯ i̯a		ui̯ uːi̯ u̯a
Mid	ei̯ ɛːi̯ eu̯ ɛːu̯		ou̯ oi̯ ɔːi̯
Open		ai̯ aːi̯ au̯ aːu̯

Sounds /ɛ, ɔ/ may have short allophones of more close [e, o].^[3]

Tone

References

↑ Tedim at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
↑ "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.

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[e18-1] Tedim at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

[2] "Proposal to Encode the Pau Cin Hau Alphabet in ISO/IEC 10646" (PDF). unicode.org. Retrieved 15 September 2023.

[3] 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.

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