User:Saraphina9666/Dungan language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dungan people are a Muslim ethnic minority group primarily in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan who are related to the Ethic group, Hui people in China. They are the descendants of refugees from China, who migrated west, who, because of their unique ethnic background, developed a language based on a Mandarin-based dialect that is infused with specific words from the Persian, Turkic, and Arabic dialects. The Dungan language has flourished, “Despite the fact that the two languages belong to different language families, Chinese belonging to the Sino- Tibetan language family and Persian to the Indo- European, there is a significant percentage of Persian loan words found in the vocabulary of Chinese Muslims, many of them descendants of Persian traders travelling the Silk Road who settled in China and married Chinese women.”[1]
The Dungan language, now considered an endangered language, is written in Cyrillic. Dungan is a tonal language with influences of Russian, Chinese and Turkish languages. It is one of the few variations of Chinese that is not normally written using traditional Chinese characters and the Hui people wrote their language in an Arabic-based alphabet, Xiao'erjing. In the Soviet Union, the standard Dungan language, as we know it today, was evolved mostly in the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan regions. It was based on a dialect of the Gansu Province, rather than Standard Chinese. "Speakers of Dungan fled from Manchu and Chinese persecution over a hundred years ago after an abortive rebellion." Ager, Simon. "Omniglot - writing systems and languages of the world". 17th February 2021. [https://omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm.
The Dungan language is a Sinitic language of the Sino-Tibetan family. Spoken in the countries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.” There are 90,000 native speakers. They also speak Mandarin, Russian and Arabic. It is currently endangered. "The native name for the language is Хуэйзў йүян, which translates into 'language of the Hui'. In Chinese language, it is known as 东干语 (dōnggānyǔ)[1]" . Dungan is a tonal language and was originally written in the Arabic alphabet. "Following the Hui migration into what would become the Soviet Union, the language also became fell under the influence of Russian speaking people, along with neighboring Turkic languages and it began to be written with the Cyrillic Alphabet. During the Soviet era, Russian technical vocabulary began to enter Dungan which made it a more unique form of Mandarin."[2] "The term "Dungan" was first used in the late 18th century. Between 1755 and 1759, after suppressing a rebellion of local tribes, the Qing government moved floods of Hui people from Shaanxi and Gansu into Xinjiang to open up the frontier areas on a vast scale."[3]
‘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 (14,000 words), 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.” Wiki’
“When Dru C. Gladney, a professor of anthropology, 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".” wiki