14 Facts About Pahawh Hmong

Pahawh Hmong is an indigenous semi-syllabic script, invented in 1959 by Shong Lue Yang, to write two Hmong languages, Hmong Daw and Hmong Njua AKA Hmong Leng .

Pahawh Hmong has twenty onset letters to transcribe sixty phonemic onsets.

Some Pahawh Hmong communities consider second stage to be more authentic, while others prefer third stage as more regular.

Pahawh Hmong was the product of a native messianic movement, based on the idea that, throughout history, God had given the Hmong power through the gift of writing, and revoked it as divine retribution.

Shong continually modified the Pahawh Hmong script, producing four increasingly sophisticated versions, until he was assassinated by Laotian soldiers in 1971 to stop his growing influence as part of the opposition resistance.

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Knowledge of the later stages of Pahawh Hmong come to us through his disciple Chia Koua Vang, who corresponded with Shong in prison.

Pahawh is not as widespread as RPA romanization for writing Hmong, partially because of the difficulties in typesetting it, but it is a source of great pride for many Hmong who do not use it, as in Southeast Asia every respectable language has a script of its own, which RPA does not provide.

Pahawh Hmong makes a number of phonemic contrasts unfamiliar to English speakers.

Pahawh Hmong diacritics were devised by Shong Lue Yang in isolation, and have no genetic relation to similar-looking punctuation in the European tradition .

Nevertheless, even if the graphic forms of Pahawh Hmong letters derive from other scripts, much of the typology of the script, with its primary rimes and secondary onsets, would appear to be Shong's invention.

Later stages of Pahawh Hmong became typologically more like Lao and the Roman alphabet, suggesting that perhaps they influenced its evolution.

In early Pahawh Hmong, tone depends on the rime and is modified with irregular diacritics.

Pahawh Hmong alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.

Since 2019 until now, Pahawh Hmong has been accepted by Unicode and the UCS for international use.