Iu Mien, often shortened to Mien and historically grouped under the broader name Yao, is a language of the Hmong-Mien family. It originated in southern China and is spoken by Mien communities in China, northern Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. After the wars in Indochina, refugee resettlement carried the language to the United States, where sizeable Mien communities live in California and the Pacific Northwest. Estimates put total speaker numbers at several hundred thousand to around a million. Iu Mien is tonal, and its vocabulary includes many loanwords from Chinese. A romanised script agreed in 1984 unified earlier competing systems and is now widely used in community publications and religious texts, while older materials written in Chinese characters also exist.
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