Dungan language

Dungan (/ˈdʊŋɡɑːn/ or /ˈdʌŋɡən/) is a Sinitic language[2] 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.

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.

[3] 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.

[3] 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".

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".

The Dungan ethnic group are the descendants of refugees from China who migrated west into Central Asia.

However, even at the level of basic vocabulary, Dungan contains many words not present in modern Mandarin dialects, such as Russian, Arabic, Turkic, and Persian loanwords.

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.

Xiao'erjing is now virtually extinct in Dungan society, but it remains in limited use by some Hui communities in China.