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 o ...

nationality. The other language spoken within the same community is Western Yughur, which is a

Turkic language The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic languag ...

. 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 bilingual A passive speaker (also referred to as a receptive bilingual or passive bilingual) is a category of speaker who has had enough exposure to a language in childhood to have a native-like comprehension of it, but has little or no active command of ...

ism with Inner Mongolian, the standard spoken in China. Eastern Yugur is a threatened language with an aging population of fluent speakers. Language contact 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 Western Yugur (Western Yugur: (Yugur speech) or (Yugur word)) also known as Neo-Uygur is the Turkic language spoken by the Yugur people. It is contrasted with Eastern Yugur, a Mongolic language spoken within the same community. Traditionally, b ...

, 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