The Tangwang language () is a variety of

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...

heavily influenced by the Mongolic

Santa language The Santa language, also known as Dongxiang (), is a Mongolic language spoken by the Dongxiang people in Northwest China. Dialects There are no dialects in strict sense, but three local varieties (''tuyu'') can be found: Suonanba (ca. 50% of all ...

(Dongxiang). It is spoken in a dozen or so villages in Dongxiang Autonomous County,

Gansu Province Gansu (, ; alternately romanized as Kansu) is a province in Northwest China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeast part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibet ...

, China. The linguist Mei W. Lee-Smith calls this

creole language A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...

the "Tangwang language" (), based on the names of the two largest villages (Tangjia 唐家 and Wangjia 汪家, parts of Tangwang

town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an o ...

) where it is spoken.

Speakers

According to Lee-Smith (1996), the Tangwang language is spoken by about 20,000 people living in the north-eastern part of the Dongxiang Autonomous County (Tangwang town). These people self-identify as Dongxiang (Santa) or

Hui people The Hui people ( zh, c=, p=Huízú, w=Hui2-tsu2, Xiao'erjing: , dng, Хуэйзў, ) are an East Asian ethnoreligious group predominantly composed of Chinese-speaking adherents of Islam. They are distributed throughout China, mainly in the ...

. The Tangwang speakers don't speak Dongxiang language.

Description

The Tangwang language uses mostly Mandarin words and morphemes with Dongxiang grammar. Besides Dongxiang loanwords, Tangwang also has a substantial number of Arabic and Persian loanwords. Like standard Mandarin, Tangwang is a tonal language. However, grammatical particles, which are typically borrowed from Mandarin but used in the way Dongxiang morphemes would be used in Dongxiang, do not carry tones. For example, while the Mandarin plural suffix () has only very restricted usage (it can be used with personal pronouns and some nouns related to people), Tangwang uses it, in the form , universally, the way Dongxiang would use its plural suffix . The Mandarin pronoun () can be used in Tangwang as a possessive suffix (meaning "your"). Unlike Mandarin, but like Dongxiang, Tangwang has grammatical cases as well (but only four of them, instead of eight in Dongxiang). The word order of Tangwang is the same as Dongxiang subject–object–verb form. Tangwang combines the characteristics of Mandarin Chinese and Dongxiang Mongolian. The hybrid language is a symbol of language blending. According to Lee-Smith, the blending is caused by the

Silk Road The Silk Road () was a network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles), it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and rel ...

Speakers

Description

See also

References

Further reading