Muong (Mường) is the closest relative of Vietnamese, the national language of Vietnam. Within the Vietic group of the Austroasiatic language family, the Northern Vietic subgroup (also known as "Viet-Muong") consists of Vietnamese and Muong. Among the language varieties which evolved historically out of Proto-Viet-Muong, Vietnamese gradually became the most widespread and influential; in Michel Ferlus's classification, all the other language varieties of this subgroup are referred to as "Muong". Linguistically speaking, the Nguồn language is also part of Muong.
The archived documents: vocabulary, and some narratives
The recordings made available here were conducted by Michel Ferlus, in collaboration with colleagues in Vietnam and Laos. They mostly contain lexical data; there are also some narratives. As Ferlus's field notes have not been verified item by item to finalize the word list, it was decided to put the data online without a transcription, rather than run the risk of publishing data that contain mistaken transcriptions.
References
The EFEO-CNRS-SOAS Word List for Linguistic Fieldwork in Southeast Asia, used to elicit the vocabulary, is available here.
About the Mường language, see Ferlus (2004) and references therein:
Classification of the Vietic languages (a.k.a. Viet-Muong, Việt-Chứt) after Ferlus 1996, with links to the corresponding pages in the Pangloss Collection:
1. Maleng | 2. Arem | 3. Chứt | 4. Aheu | 5. Hung | 6. Thổ | 7. Mường (this page) | 8. Vietnamese |
These materials were digitized by the International Research Institute MICA (HUST – CNRS/UMI-2954 – Grenoble INP) in partnership with CNRS-LACITO, as part of the DO-RE-MI-FA project (Sept. 2014-Feb. 2016), funded by the Digital Scientific Library, a programme of the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research.
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Last updated 2016.