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:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“It is silly to call fat people “gravitationally challenged”Ma self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.”
—Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)