Dungan language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

The Dungan language is a Sinitic language spoken by the Dungan of Central Asia, an ethnic group related to the Hui people of China.

Demographics

Dungan is spoken primarily in Kyrgyzstan, with speakers in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia as well. The Dungan ethnic group are the descendants of refugees from China who migrated west into Central Asia. It is used in the school system. In the Soviet time there were several school textbooks published for studying the Dungan language, a three volume Russian-Dungan dictionary (14,000 words), the Dungan-Russian dictionary, philology monographs on the language and books in Dungan. The first Dungan-language newspaper was established in 1932; it continues publication today in weekly form.

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 mother tongue appears to have fallen sharply.

Phonology

In basic structure and vocabulary, the Dungan language is not very different from Mandarin Chinese, specifically a variety of Zhongyuan Mandarin (not Lan-Yin 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 languages, 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

The corresponding table compares current Dungan spelling, old Dungan spelling, pinyin, and IPA.

Vowels

Using standard Mandarin vowels as basis, the follow are each vowels and their respective current Dungan spelling, old Dungan spelling, pinyin, and IPA.

Note that the correspondence between Dungan vowels and Standard Mandarin vowels is not perfect.

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

Tones

Vocabulary

The basilects of Gansu/Shaanxi Mandarin and Dungan are largely mutually intelligible; Chinese journalists conversant in one of those Mandarin dialects report that they can make themselves understood when communicating with Dungan speakers. However, even at the level of basic vocabulary, Dungan contains many words not present in modern Mandarin dialects, such as Arabic and Persian loanwords, as well as archaic Qing dynasty-era Chinese vocabulary.^[1] Furthermore, the acrolects of Dungan and Gansu/Shaanxi Mandarin have diverged significantly due to time and cultural influences. During the 20th century, translators and intellectuals introduced many neologisms and calques into the Chinese language, especially for political and technical concepts. However, the Dungan, cut off from the mainstream of Chinese discourse by orthographic barriers, instead borrowed words for those same concepts from Russian, with which they came into contact through government and higher education. As result of these borrowings, the equivalent standard Chinese terms are not widely known or understood among the Dungan.^[2]

Writing system

Books in Dungan, or about Dungan (in Russian or English). Most of them were published in Frunze, Kirghiz SSR in the 1970s and 80s.

Note

• The letters О, Ъ and Ь are only used to write Russian loanwords

Dungan is unique in that it is the only variety of the Chinese language which is not normally written using Chinese characters. Originally the Dungan, who were Muslim descendants of the Hui, wrote their language in an Arabic-based system known as Xiao'erjing. The Soviet Union banned all Arabic scripts in the late 1920s, which led to a Latin orthography. The Latin orthography lasted until 1940, 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. Tones marks or numbering do not appear in general-purpose writing, but are specified in dictionaries, even for loanwords.

Consonant chart:

Literature

A number of books in Dungan language, including textbooks, Dungan-Russian and Russian-Dungan dictionaries, a Dungan etymological dictionary, collections of folk tales, original and translated fiction and poetry have been published in Kyrgyzstan. Usual print runs were no more than a few hundred copies. A newspaper in Dungan has been published as well.

Works of the Dungan poet Yasir Shiwaza (Iasyr Shivaza) have been translated into Russian, Standard Mandarin Chinese, and a number of other languages, with print runs in some of them been much higher than in the original Dungan. English translations of some of them, along with the original Dungan text, are available in the book by S. Rimsky-Korsakoff (1991).

See also

• Diasystem

External links

• Ethnologue entry
• "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform": long essay on Dungan, with sample texts
• Dungan writing system in Omniglot
• The Shaanxi Village in Kazakhstan
• Soviet census data for mother tongue and second language, in English
• Olli Salmi.Central Asian Dungan as a Chinese Dialect. http://www.uusikaupunki.fi/~olsalmi/dungan/Dungan%20as%20Chinese%20Dialect.html

References

1. ^ "The "Shaanxi Village" in Kazakhstan", China Radio International - CRIENGLISH.com (2004-07-09). 
2. ^ Mair, Victor (May 1990). "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform". Sino-Platonic Papers (18), http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html. 

• Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, "Soviet Dungan: The Chinese language of Central Asia: alphabet, phonology, morphology." Asian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, 1967. (No ISBN).
• Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, "Iasyr Shivaza: The Life and Works of a Soviet Dungan Poet". 1991. ISBN 3631439636. (Contains a detailed bibliography and ample samples of Shivaza works', some in the original Cyrillic Dungan, although most in a specialized transcription, with English and sometimes standard Chinese translations).
• Olga I. Zavjalova. Some Phonological Aspects of the Dungan Dialects // Computational Analyses of Asian and African Languages. Tokyo, 1978. No. 9. Pp. 1–24. (Contains an experimental analysis of Dungan tones).
• 海峰。 中亚东干语言研究 （Hai Feng. Zhongya Donggan yuyan yanjiu -- A Study of the Dungan Language of Central Asia.) Urumchi, 2003. 479 p. ISBN 7-5631-1789-X. (A most detailed and up-to-date description of the Dungan language by a professor of Xinjiang University).