Dongxiang language

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Dongxiang
Santa
Spoken in China
Region Gansu province, mainly in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, and Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region[1]
Total speakers 250,000[2]
Language family Altaic[3] (controversial)
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 tut
ISO 639-3 sce
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Dongxiang language (东乡语), also referred to as the Santa language or Sarta language, is a Mongolic language spoken by the Dongxiang people in northwest China.

Contents

[edit] Phonology

Dongxiang has neither vowel harmony nor distinctions of vowel length.[2]

[edit] Grammar

In common with other Mongolic languages, Dongxiang is basically a Subject Object Verb language. In Linxia, however, under the influence of the Mandarin dialects spoken by the neighbouring Hui people, sentences of the Subject Verb Object type have also been observed.[4]

[edit] Writing system

Knowledge of Arabic is widespread among the Sarta, and as a result, they often use the Arabic alphabet to write down their language informally (cf. the Xiao'erjing system that was used by Hui people); however, this has been little investigated by scholars. As of 2003, the official Latin orthography for Dongxiang, developed on the basis of the system used for the Monguor language, remained in the experimental stage.[5]

[edit] The Tangwang creole language

Main article: Tangwang language

There are about 20,000 people in the north-eastern part Dongxiang County, who self-identify as Dongxiang or Hui people who don't speak Dongxiang language, but speak natively a Dongxiang-influenced form of Mandarin. The linguist Mei W. Lee-Smith calls this creole language the "Tangwang language" (Chinese: 唐汪话), based on the names of the two largest villages (Tangjia and Wangjia, parts of Tangwang Town) where it is spoken. [6] According to Lee-Smith, the Tangwang language uses mostly Mandarin words and morphemes with Dongxiang grammar. Besides Dongxiang loanwords, Tangwang also has a substantial number of Arabic and Persian loanwords.[6]

Like standard Mandarin, Tangwang is a tonal language, but grammatical particles, which are typically borrowed from Mandarin, but are used in the way Dongxiang morphemes would be used in Dongxiang, don't carry tones.[6]

For example, while the Mandarin plural suffix -men (们) has only very restricted usage (it can be used with personal pronouns and some nouns related to people), Tangwang uses it, in the form -m, universally, the way Dongxiang would use its plural suffix -la. Mandarin pronoun ni (你) can be used in Tangwang as a possessive suffix (meaning "your"). Unlike Mandarin, but like Dongxiang, Tangwang has grammatical cases as well (but only 4 of them, instead of 8 in Dongxiang).[6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bao 2006
  2. ^ a b Gordon 2005, Dongxiang
  3. ^ Gordon 2005, Altaic
  4. ^ Bao 2006, 1.1: 东乡语的语序特点
  5. ^ Kim 2003, p. 348
  6. ^ a b c d Lee-Smith, Mei W. (1996), "The Tangwang language", in Wurm, Stephen A., Atlas of languages of intercultural communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas, Volume 2, Part 1. (Volume 13 of Trends in Linguistics, Documentation Series)., Walter de Gruyter, pp. 875-882, ISBN 3110134179, http://books.google.ca/books?id=glU0vte5gSkC 

[edit] Sources

[edit] Further reading

  • Field, Kenneth Lynn (1997), A grammatical overview of Santa Mongolian, PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara 
  • 马国忠/Ma Guozhong (2001), 东乡语汉语词典/Dongxiang-Chinese Dictionary, Lanzhou: 甘肃民族出版社/Gansu Nationalities Publishing House, ISBN 7542107674 

[edit] External links

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