Hmong Bible White

The White Hmong reference Bible, 1,741 pages, published by the American Bible Society. It sits in this catalog for a reason that has little to do with whether a reader is religious. Hmong had no widely used writing system until the Romanized Popular Alphabet was devised in the 1950s, and the translation projects that followed produced the first large bodies of continuous Hmong prose anyone had ever set in type. For a great many Hmong readers — in Laos, in the Thai camps, and in the United States — a Bible was the first substantial book they held in their own language, and the orthographic conventions those translators settled on are the ones still used to write Hmong today. Read as a landmark in Hmong literacy, it is difficult to overstate. White Hmong, RPA, reference edition with cross-references.