Pangkhua (Pangkhu), or Paang, is a Kuki-Chin language primarily spoken in Bangladesh and India. Most speakers of Pangkhu are bilingual in Bengali or Mizo in the respective countries and most education in Pangkhu is conducted in that language.
Since there is essentially no literature in Pangkhua, other than oral folk tales and songs, the Pangkhua community members use Lushai literature. There are minimal language differences between Pangkhua, Tlanglau, Falam Chin, Bawm and Mizo.
The dialects of the two main communities that use Pangkhu, Bilaichari and Konglak, share 88% of their basic vocabulary. Residents of Pangkhua Para refer to their village as Dinthar (IPA: ; from Mizo dêin 'stay' and Mizo and Pangkua têðar 'new')
Pangkhu has twenty-one consonant phonemes:
However, only unaspirated voiceless stops, /h/, /r/, /m/, /n/, /Ã Â/, and /l/ may occur at syllable coda. When stops occur in coda position, they are not audibly released. The glottal fricative /h/ may be deleted syllable-initially.
There are also seven vowel phonemes:
The vowel [æ] serves as an allophone of /e/ and [o] serves as an allophone of /u/. Vowel length contrasts occur only in closed syllables and diphthongs. There are 9 diphthongs, these being /ÃÂi/, /ÃÂu/, /ei/, /eu/, /ÃÂu/, /ou/, /iÃÂ/, /uÃÂ/, and /ui/. Diphthongs and long vowels are monophthongized following another syllable.
The basic syllable structure of Pangkhu is (C)(L)V(X), with L being a lateral consonant and X being a coda consonant.
There are two tones: a high tone and low tone.
Augmentative -pui and diminutive -te can be affixed to kinship terms in order to denote relative age or size.
The gender suffixes -pÃÂ and -mÃÂ may derive a new referent from a root, as in lÃÂl 'monarch', lÃÂlpÃÂ 'king, and lÃÂlnu 'queen'.
Negation -lÃÂu can be suffixed to a root to denote its opposite, as in dam 'healthy' and damlÃÂu 'sick'.
In Pangkhua, only human nouns can be marked for plurality and only animate marked for gender. Relator nouns share a function similar to adpositions in other languages.