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
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“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
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“We have tried so hard to adulterate our hearts, and have so greatly abused the microscope to study the hideous excrescences and shameful warts which cover them and which we take pleasure in magnifying, that it is impossible for us to speak the language of other men.”
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