Tuoba (Tabγač or Tabghach; also Taγbač or Taghbach; ) is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

language spoken by the

Tuoba The Tuoba (reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation: *''tʰak-bɛt''), also known as the Taugast or Tabgach ( otk, 𐱃𐰉𐰍𐰲 ''Tabγač''), was a Xianbei clan in Imperial China.Wei Shou. '' Book of Wei''. Vol. 1 During the Sixteen King ...

people in northern China around the 5th century AD during the

Northern Wei Wei (), known in historiography as the Northern Wei (), Tuoba Wei (), Yuan Wei () and Later Wei (), was founded by the Tuoba (Tabgach) clan of the Xianbei. The first of the Northern and Southern dynasties#Northern dynasties, Northern dynasties ...

dynasty.

Classification

Alexander Vovin Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin (russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Ad ...

(2007) identifies the Tuoba language as a

Mongolic language The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language ...

. On the other hand,

Juha Janhunen Juha Janhunen (born 12 February 1952 in Pori, Finland) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994 he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork o ...

proposed that the Tuoba might have spoken an Oghur Turkic language. According to

Peter Boodberg Peter Alexis Boodberg (born Pyotr Alekseyevich Budberg; 8 April 1903 – 29 June 1972) was a Russian-American scholar, linguist, and sinologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley for 40 years. Boodberg was influential in 20th ...

, the Tuoba language was essentially Turkic with Mongolic admixture. Chen Sanping noted that the Tuoba language "had both" Turkic and Mongolic elements. Liu Xueyao stated that Tuoba may have had their own language, which should not be assumed to be identical with any other known languages.Liu Xueyao p. 83-86 Andrew Shimunek (2017) classifies Tuoba (Tabghach) as a "Serbi" (i.e.,

para-Mongolic Para-Mongolic is a proposed group of languages that is considered to be an extinct sister branch of the Mongolic languages. Para-Mongolic contains certain historically attested extinct languages, among them Khitan and Tuyuhun. Languages The ...

) language. Shimunek's Serbi branch also consists of the

Tuyuhun Tuyuhun (; LHC: *''tʰɑʔ-jok-guənʔ''; Wade-Giles: ''T'u-yühun''), also known as Henan () and Azha (; ), was a dynastic kingdom established by the nomadic peoples related to the Xianbei in the Qilian Mountains and upper Yellow River valle ...

and Khitan languages.

Morphology

Some functional suffixes are: * *-A(y) ~ *ʁa(y) ‘verbal noun suffix’ * *-Al ~ *-l ‘deverbal noun suffix’ * **čɪ ~ **či ‘suffix denoting occupations’ * **-mɔr/-mʊr ( 萬) ‘deverbal noun suffix’ * **-n ‘plural suffix’

Lexicon

Selected basic Taghbach words from Shimunek (2017) are listed below. Forms reconstructed using the

comparative method In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards t ...

are marked with one asterisk (*), while forms reconstructed according to the Chinese

fanqie ''Fanqie'' ( zh, t= 反切, p=fǎnqiè) is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one ...

spellings and/or rhymes of the traditional Chinese philological tradition are marked with two asterisks (**) (originally marked as ✩ by Shimunek 2017).

References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Tuoba language Languages attested from the 5th century Agglutinative languages Unclassified languages of Asia Languages of China Medieval languages Extinct languages of Asia Tuoba