Language
The Salar language has two large dialect groups. The divergence is due to the fact that one branch was influenced by the Tibetan and Chinese languages, and the other branch by the Uyghur and Kazakh languages.
In the late 1990s, it was estimated that out of the some 89,000 Salars, around 60,000 spoke the Salar language. In addition to Chinese, many Salar also speak Tibetan. Salar is a written language, as Ma et al. (2001) demonstrate, but the written language is rarely used. There are reported similarities with Turkmen.
Read more about this topic: Salar People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Though language forms the preacher,
‘Tis “good works” make the man.”
—Eliza Cook (1818–1889)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is “only words” and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)