Eastern Yugur is a Mongolic language spoken within the Yugur 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 more than 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 West Asia. The Turkic langua ...

. 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 China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. 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 with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum ...

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 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