Dungan language


Dungan is a Sinitic language spoken primarily in the Chu Valley of southeastern Kazakhstan and northern Kyrgyzstan. It is the native language of the Dungan people, a Hui subgroup that fled Qing China in the 19th century. It evolved from the Central Plains Mandarin variety spoken in Gansu and Shaanxi. It is the only Sino-Tibetan language to be officially written in the Cyrillic script. In addition, the Dungan language contains loanwords and archaisms not found in other modern varieties of Mandarin.

History

The Dungan people of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are the descendants of several groups of the Hui people that migrated to the region in the 1870s and the 1880s after the defeat of the Dungan revolt in Northwestern China. The Hui of Northwestern China would normally speak the same Mandarin dialect as the Han people in the same area. At the same time, due to their unique history, their speech would be rich in Islamic or Islam-influenced terminology, based on loanwords from Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages, as well as translations of them into Chinese. The Hui traders in the bazaars would be able to use Arabic or Persian numbers when talking between themselves, to keep their communications secret from Han bystanders. While not constituting a separate language, these words, phrases and turns of speech, known as Huihui hua, served as markers of group identity. As early 20th century travellers in Northwestern China would note, "the Mohammedan Chinese have to some extent a vocabulary and always a style and manner of speech, all their own".
As the Dungans in the Russian Empire — and even more so in the Soviet Union — were isolated from China, their language experienced significant influence from the Russian and the Turkic languages of their neighbors.
In the Soviet Union, a written standard of the Dungan language was developed, based on a dialect of the Gansu Province, rather than the Beijing base of Standard Chinese. The language was used in the schools in Dungan villages. In the Soviet time there were several school textbooks published for studying the Dungan language, a three volume Russian–Dungan dictionary, the Dungan–Russian dictionary, linguistics monographs on the language and books in Dungan. The first Dungan-language newspaper was established in 1932; it continues publication today in weekly form.
When Dru C. Gladney, who had spent some years working with the Hui people in China, met with Dungans in Almaty in 1988, he described the experience as speaking "in a hybrid Gansu dialect that combined Turkish and Russian lexical items".

Mutual intelligibility with Mandarin dialects

There is a varying degree of mutual intelligibility between Dungan and various Mandarin dialects. The Central Plains Mandarin varieties and Jin Chinese are both understood by Dungans. On the other hand, Dungan speakers like Iasyr Shivaza and others have reported that people who speak the Beijing Mandarin dialect can understand Dungan, but Dungans could not understand Beijing Mandarin.

Geographical distribution

Dungan is spoken primarily in Kyrgyzstan, with speakers in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well. The Dungan ethnic group are the descendants of refugees from China who migrated west into Central Asia.
According to the Soviet census statistics from 1970 to 1989, the Dungan maintained the use of their ethnic language much more successfully than other minority ethnic groups in Central Asia; however, in the post-Soviet period, the proportion of Dungans speaking the Dungan language as their native language appears to have fallen sharply.
YearDungan L1Russian L2Total Dungan populationSource
197036,445 18,566 38,644
197949,020 32,429 51,694
198965,698 49,075 69,323
200141,400 N/A100,000

Phonology

In basic structure and vocabulary, the Dungan language is not very different from Mandarin Chinese, specifically a variety of Zhongyuan Mandarin spoken in the southern part of the province of Gansu and the western part of the valley of Guanzhong in the province of Shaanxi. Like other Chinese varieties, Dungan is tonal. There are two main dialects, one with 4 tones and the other, considered standard, with 3 tones in the final position in phonetic words and 4 tones in the nonfinal position.

Consonants

  • can also be heard as a voiced fricative among other Gansu dialects.
  • can be heard as in the Şanşi dialects.
  • The labialized retroflex fricatives and affricates can be respectively pronounced as the labiodental . This phenomenon can be observed through the word фə, with the initial being , as opposed to in Old Mandarin. Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff: "There is a tendency in some speakers for the retroflexed alveo-palatals to be pronounced as rounded labio-dental affricates. Hashimoto has traced this phenomenon in other North-west dialects." Hashimoto: "A theoretically more interesting point here is that Chinese palatals /č, č’, etc./ go to Zhunyanese labials "

    Vowels

CyrillicLatinPinyinIPACyrillicLatinPinyinIPACyrillicLatinPinyinIPACyrillicLatinPinyinIPA
ыîiиii, ўûu, үüü, u
аaaяia ia уаuauaүaüaüa
әêeеie уәuêueүәüeüe
эeê, aiуэueuai
оoaoёio iao уэйueiui
ыйîieiуйuiwei
уuouюiu iu уоuouo
анananянian ian уанuanuanүанüanüan
онonangёнion iang уонuonuang
ынîneng, enинining, in, унunong, үнüniong, ün
эрererўнûnung

  • can be heard as in Kyrgyzstan.
Vowel constructs that can be used as independent syllable without consonants are shown in parentheses. There are rhotacised vowels, as well as some syllables only seen in loan words from Russian, Arabic, Kyrgyz, etc., in addition to the above table.

Tones

Tones in Dungan are marked with nothing, a ъ and ь.

Writing system

The modern Dungan language is the only Chinese language that is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as they lived under Soviet rule. It is a Russian-based alphabet plus five additional letters: Ә, Җ, Ң, Ў and Ү. As such, it differs from the Palladius System that is normally used in Russia to render Chinese in Cyrillic.
File:Dungan-books-2450.jpg|thumb|right|Books in Dungan or about Dungan. Most of them were published in Frunze, Kirghiz SSR
in the 1970s and 80s
Image:E8016-Milyanfan-museum.jpg|thumb|right|Bilingual sign in Dungan and Russian respectively, at the home of Soviet war hero
  • The letters ъ and ь are only used to write Russian loanwords and tone markings on children's primers dictionaries.
Dungan is unique in that it is one of the few varieties of Chinese that is not normally written using Chinese characters. Though it may be seen written in Chinese characters, this writing system is now considered obsolete. Originally, the Dungan, as descendants of the Hui, wrote their language in an Arabic-based alphabet known as Xiao'erjing. The Soviet Union banned all Arabic scripts in 1925, which led to a Latin orthography based on Yañalif. The Latin orthography lasted until 1952, when the Soviet government promulgated the current Cyrillic-based system. Xiao'erjing is now virtually extinct in Dungan society, but it remains in limited use by some Hui communities in China.
The writing system is based on the standard 3-tone dialect. Tone marks or numbering do not appear in general-purpose writing, but are specified in dictionaries, even for loanwords. The tones are specified using the soft sign, hard sign, or none.

Comparison with Palladius system

Grammar

Classifiers

Chinese varieties usually have different classifiers for different types of nouns, with northern varieties tending to have fewer classifiers than southern ones. is the only classifier found in the Dungan language, though not the only measure word.