Eastern Yugur is the Mongolic language spoken within the

Yugur The Yugurs, Yughurs, Yugu (; Western Yugur: ''Sarïg Yogïr''; Eastern Yugur: ''Šera Yogor''), traditionally known as Yellow Uyghurs, are a Turko- Mongolic ethnic group and one of China's 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, consisting ...

nationality. The other language spoken within the same community is Western Yughur, which is a Turkic language. The terms may also indicate the speakers of these languages, which are both unwritten. Traditionally, both languages are indicated by the term Yellow Uygur, from the autonym of the Yugur. Eastern Yugur speakers are said to have passive bilingualism with Inner Mongolian, the standard spoken in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

. Eastern Yugur is a threatened language with an aging population of fluent speakers.

Language contact Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for th ...

with neighbouring languages, particularly Chinese, has noticeably affected the language competency of younger speakers. Some younger speakers have also begun to lose their ability to distinguish between different phonetic shades within the language, indicating declining language competency.

Grigory Potanin Grigory Nikolayevich Potanin (alt. Grigorij Potanin) (russian: Григорий Николаевич Потанин; 4 October 1835 – 6 June 1920) was a Russian ethnographer and natural historian. He was an explorer of Inner Asia, and was ...

recorded a glossary of Salar, Western Yugur, and Eastern Yugur in his 1893 book written in Russian, ''The Tangut-Tibetan Borderlands of China and Central Mongolia''.

Phonology

The phonemes /ç, çʰ, ɕ, ɕʰ, ʂ, ʑ/ appear exclusively in Chinese loanwords. Vowel length is also distributed.

Phonology

References

Further reading