White Hmong-English Dictionary

This is the reference every other Hmong dictionary gets measured against. Ernest Heimbach compiled it from fieldwork with White Hmong speakers and Cornell's Southeast Asia Program first issued it in 1969, under the older and now discarded title White Meo-English Dictionary; the 1997 reissue is the one you can still buy. Nearly five hundred pages, RPA throughout, with the tone marking and grammatical detail a learner or a linguist actually needs. It is a scholarly dictionary and it reads like one, so it rewards patience rather than a quick lookup. Its age shows in the vocabulary: it predates the diaspora, and it will not help with a word that was coined in St. Paul. That is also exactly its value, because it records the language as it was spoken in Laos before the war scattered the people who spoke it. For serious learners, linguists, and any library building a Hmong studies collection.