Tedim language

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.

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)[1]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Tibeto-Burman Kuki-Chin-Mizo-Zomi Zomi-Chin Tedim Tedim Chin
Writing system	Latin Pau Cin Hau script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ctd
Glottolog	tedi1235
ELP	Tiddim Chin

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
	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

1. Tedim
   Tedim Chin 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.