It is named after Huishui County, Guizhou, though not all varieties are spoken there.
The endonym is Mhong, though it shares this with Gejia and it is simply a variant spelling of Hmong.
Matisoff (2001) split it into four separate languages, and, conservatively, did not retain it as a group.
Below is a list of Miao dialects and their respective speaker populations and distributions from Li (2018),[2] along with representative datapoints from Wang (1985).
[3] According to Sun (2017), the northern dialect of Huishui Miao is spoken in the following townships by a total of approximately 50,000 speakers.