Language
The Dungan language, which the Dungan people call "Hui language" (Хуэйзў йүян or Huejzw jyian), is similar to Mandarin Chinese Zhongyuan dialect which is widely spoken in the south of Gansu and the west of Guanzhong in Shaanxi in China.
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.
Despite having many common Chinese vocabulary, some Dungan vocabulary may sound 'nostalgic' to Chinese people. They call "President" as "Emperor" (“Хуангди”，huan'g-di), "government offices" as "yamen(ямын，ya-min)", a classical name for mandarin's offices in ancient China. It also contains many loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and Turkic. Since the 1950s, the language is written in Cyrillic script, making it the only Chinese dialects that are completely written in pinyin.
Unlike other minority nationalities in Central Asia, such as the local Koreans, most Dungan people are trilingual. More than two-thirds of the Dungan also speak Russian, and a small proportion can speak Kyrgyz or other languages belonging to the titular nationalities of the countries where they live.
Read more about this topic: Dungan People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)