The Tangwang Language

Dan Xu

The Tangwang Language

An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Northwest
China

123
Dan Xu
Département Chine
Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales
Paris
France

ISBN 978-3-319-59228-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59229-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59229-9
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Preface

The Tangwang language was first reported by Chen Yuanlong (Ibrahim 1985) in
the Minzu yuwen [Minority languages of China]. Two decades later, the Tangwang
language started attracting the curiosity of many researchers. My French colleagues
Alain Peyraube, Redouane Djamouri, and I have participated in two projects funded
and supported by the French government: ANR-07-BLAN-0023 “Language con-
tact and linguistic change: the case of Chinese and Altaic” led by Djamouri, then
ANR-12-BSH2-0004-01 “Do languages and genes correlate?—A case study in
Northwestern China” directed by myself.
In 2014, my book Tangwanghua yanjiu [Studies of the Tangwang language] was
published in Chinese by Minzu chubanshe [The Ethnic Publishing House].
However, this work is not accessible to scholars who do not read Chinese but are
interested in language contact and language mixing. Languages inside China are
still less known by linguists outside of China. Eventually I decided to provide a
simplified version in English instead of a translated one. In the present volume,
Chaps. 3–5 summarize the main results of Chaps. 2–4 which make up 244 pages in
the Chinese book.
From 2014 to 2016, our interdisciplinary research has advanced significantly,
collaborating with genetic researchers. Chapters 1, 2, and 6 present new and current
findings with different approaches. Some results have been published in scientific
journals, and others will appear very soon. The aim of the book is clear: it attempts
to combine different domains combining human sciences and natural sciences to
break down the barriers between these two fields. Despite difficulties encountered in
the reconstitution of languages and genes, it is amazing to read so many articles
published by biologists and archeologists in different scientific journals on the
coevolution of genes and languages. Linguists seem to be too prudent and careful to
avoid making mistakes. If we work on linguistic data together with archeological
and genetic evidence, we may be able to reconcile them to produce a more reliable
picture of the history of different peoples and their languages. This book will not be
limited to describing the language but will also attempt to explore the social context
of the target language including genetic, historic, and anthropological approaches to
better understand the Tangwang language. One of the major difficulties in human

v
vi Preface

sciences is quantification of data. The book has also made some tentative research
into the methodology of data quantification, hoping to make linguistic conclusions
verifiable.
Thanks to grant ANR-12-BSH2-0004-01 by the French government, many Ph.D.
students have contributed to the project of digitizing our data. Gratitude goes to
Saiyinjiya Caidengduoerji (for Mongolian and Manchu-Tungusic groups), Barbara
Kozhevina (for Turkic groups), Li Ting (for Tibetan languages), Liu Keyou, and
Wang Cong (for Sinitic languages). I am also very grateful to Profs. Xie Xiaodong
(Lanzhou University, Gansu) and Li Hui (Fudan University, Shanghai) who have
given me great help in taking part in this project and providing me with genetic
documents. I am indebted to Prof. Li Hui, who not only checked the paragraphs
related to genetics, but also permitted me to reprint his laboratory’s graphs and
figures and to use the laboratory’s statistics. Wen Shaoqing, Wei Lanhai, Wang
Chuan-Chao, and Zhang Menghan have given me substantial assistance: helping me
learn and understand the field of genetics and their work method.
I have to express my recognitions to Chen Yuanlong (Ibrahim), the author of the
first study of the Tangwang language. He gave me important information during my
investigations, and his feedback and remarks about my book in Chinese on the
Tangwang language were especially pertinent and constructive. I have had dis-
cussions and exchanges with linguists such as Alain Peyraube, Redouane Djamouri,
Laurent Sagart, Sun Hongkai, Huang Xing, Wu Anqi, and Yixiweisa Acuo, and
their comments have been very helpful and valuable to this book. I would like also
to express my warm gratitude to my teachers, Professors Jacques Legrand,
Tumurbaatar, Tumenjargal, and Dr. Saiyinjiya Caidengduoerji for their Mongolic
language teaching, and to Prof. Françoise Robin for Tibetan language teaching.
I have learned a lot with them, and it is very beneficial for my research. My thanks
also go to Craig Baker who has corrected my English with patience and efficiency.
I owe so much to my family: Shiqi Song, Antoine Song, and Anna Song listened
patiently to my questions about quantification of the data and offered me solutions
from a mathematical perspective. Without the support and help of these people, this
book would never have been published. It is evident that all faults are mine.

Paris, France Dan Xu

June 2016
Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
1 Language Admixture and Replacement
in Northwestern China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 1
1.1 A Linguistic Area in Northwestern China . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 1
1.2 Molecular Anthropology Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 10
1.3 Correlation of Languages and Genes in the Mongolic
Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.4 Admixture and Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.4.1 Plural Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.4.2 Two Models of Language Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2 Historical, Religious and Genetic Context of Tangwang. . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.1 Historical Documents on Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2 Linguistic Situation in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.2.1 General Situation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.2.2 Body Parts, Birds and Insects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.2.3 Loanwords from Different Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.3 The Genetic History and Analysis of the Tangwang
Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 43
3 The Phonology of Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.1 Initials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.1.1 The Plosives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.1.2 The Nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1.3 The Fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1.4 The Affricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.1.5 The Lateral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.1.6 The Approximants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.1.7 The Medials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.1.8 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

vii
viii Contents

3.2 Vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.3 Tones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3.1 Tone Splits and Mergers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3.2 Tone in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.3.3 Accent/Stress in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4 Tangwang Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1 Word Building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1.1 N + Suffix [ʦɿ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.1.2 Reduplication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
4.2 Case Marking in the Tangwang Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.2.1 Nominative and Accusative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.2.2 Accusative and Dative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.2.3 Ablative Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4.2.4 Instrumental Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
4.2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.3 Suffixes Borrowed from Mongolic Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.3.1 Reflexive Possessive Suffix [nə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
4.3.2 Third Person Possessive [ȵi] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
4.3.3 The Suffix [thala] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5 Tangwang Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5.1 Word Order Typology and the Tangwang Language . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5.2 VO and OV in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
5.2.1 General Situation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
5.2.2 VO Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
5.2.3 OV Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5.2.4 VO and OV Are Both Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
5.2.5 Adverbs and OV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.2.6 Verb-Resultative Verb (VR) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.3 Influence of Standard Mandarin on Tangwang Syntax . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.3.1 Co-occurrence of ba and [xa] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
5.3.2 Copula [ʂʅ] ‘to be’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
5.3.3 The Verb [ʂuə] ‘say’ and Quoted Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.4 Aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
5.4.1 [liɔ] and [xa] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.4.2 [tʂɛ] and [tʂə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.4.3 [kuə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5.4.4 [li] and [liɛ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
5.5 Causative and Passive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.5.1 [ki] as a Causative Marker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.5.2 [ki] as a Passive Marker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
5.6 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Contents ix

6 About “Mixed Languages” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

6.1 Mixed Language Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
6.2 Lexical Versus Syntactic Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
6.2.1 Lexical Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
6.2.2 Syntactic Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
6.3 Quantification of Mixing Degree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
6.3.1 Comparison of Two Cases of Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.3.2 Further Tests and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
6.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Annex: Story in Tangwang. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Abbreviations

ABL Ablative
ACC Accusative
ADV Adverb
BA ba construction
CAUS Causative
CL Classifier
COM Comitative
COMP Comparative
CONV Converb
DEM Demonstrative
DUR Durative
EMPH Emphasize
EXP Experience aspect
EY Eastern Yugur
FP Final particle
FUT Future
GEN Genitive
HABIT Habitual
IMPER Imperative
IMPRF Imperfective
INCHO Inchoative aspect
INST Instrumental
INTERR Interrogative
MC Middle Chinese
MOD-PART Modal particle
N Noun
NEG Negative
NP Noun phrase
NUM Numeral
O Object

xi
xii Abbreviations

OC Old Chinese
PL Plural
POSS Possessive
POST Postposition
PREP Preposition
PRF Perfect
PROGR Progressive
REFL Reflexive
RES Resultative
RES-PART Resultative particle
S Subject
SG Singular
STRUC-PART Structural particle
TERM Terminative
TW Tangwang
V Verb
VP Verb phrase
WY Western Yugur
1 1st personal pronoun
2 2nd personal pronoun
3 3rd personal pronoun
Introduction

Background

Linguists who study the languages of China have long been attracted to the
Sino-Tibetan languages. The diversity of the Sinitic languages (or Chinese dialects)
and the peripheral languages is most pronounced in Southern and Southeastern
China. In the 1980s, Jin dialect began to draw the attention of scholars who came to
recognize the special status of this long-neglected dialect. Unfortunately, the
Gansu-Qinghai area has also been long understudied. Languages of Northwestern
China are almost never considered for mainstream research. The impressive maps
in the World Atlas of Language Structures Online, which presents a huge dataset on
the world’s languages, as well as the Linguistic Atlas of Chinese Dialects by Cao
(ed. 2008), which covers 268 sites of investigation inside China, have a clear focus
concentrated in Southern and Southeastern China.
Today, language contact is an important domain for linguistic research, because
it is understood that languages are linked to one another and that a language cannot
be examined solely and separately from others. From founding works to recent
papers, linguists have begun to pay close attention not only to language contact and
change but also to relative factors affecting languages such as society and culture.
There have been more and more investigations of language contact in Northwestern
China, and several milestone articles have been published: with his short but
original article “Four Notes on Chinese-Altaic Linguistic Contacts”, Norman
(1982) proposed that Northern Chinese has undergone some degree of altaicization.
This new point of view was reiterated by Hashimoto in his paper published in 1986,
“The Altaicization of Northern Chinese”. The author explicitly calls the language
contact in this area “altaicization”. Before these authors’ works, it had long been
believed that the Chinese language has influenced non-Han (non-Chinese)

xiii
xiv Introduction

languages, but that the inverse is not possible. During the same period, several
articles based on field work or on authors’ native languages revealed that in
Northwestern China, some Sinitic languages have become unrecognizable due to
contact between the Chinese language and non-Han languages. Some examples are
Cheng (1980), Li (1983), Chen (Ibrahim 1985), Ma (1984), Li (1987) among many
others. Since the 1990s, this area has attracted not only Chinese researchers
including Ringdzin Wangmo (1991) and Yixiweisa Acuo (2004), two native
Tibetan speakers, and Zhang (2006), Wang (1993), Jia (1991), Yang (2014) and
others, but also scholars all over the world such as Dwyer (1992), Zhu et al. (1997),
Dede (2003, 2007), Peyraube (2015), Djamouri (2015) and Xu (2011a, 2011b,
2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b and 2015c) among others. Some books merit mention-
ing: the collective works edited by Aikhenvald and Dixon (2001) on areal diffusion
and genetic inheritance (here in the sense of linguistic pedigree rather than in the
biological sense). Slater (2003), who works on Monguor, proposes a “Qinghai-
Gansu Sprachbund”. Janhunen (2004) suggests another point of view, using the
term “Amdo Sprachbund” (Amdo is one of the three major Tibetan dialects).
Yixiweisa Acuo (2004) presents his studies of Daohua, a Chinese-Tibetan mixed
language. Janhunen et al. (2008) published a descriptive grammar of Wutun, a
language of northwestern China, which like Daohua is considered to be a mixed
language. Xu (2014) published a grammar of Tangwang confirming that this lan-
guage is not yet a “mixed language” based on her fieldwork (see details in fol-
lowing chapters).
The Gansu-Qinghai border is a region where numerous populations live together
and speak different languages. Geographically, Gansu Province borders Qinghai to
the southwest and Xinjiang to the west. The Hexi Corridor is a horizontally shaped
migration pathway lying inside Gansu and stretching from 93° to 107° longitude. It
partially coincides with the beginning section of the famous Silk Road. At least nine
ethnic groups are found in this region: Han (Chinese), Hui (Muslim), Dongxiang
(Santa), Bao’an (Baonan), Monguor (Tu), Eastern Yugur (Dongbu Yugu), Western
Yugur (Xibu Yugu), Salar (Sala), and Amdo Tibetan. These peoples speak lan-
guages belonging to two large language families: Chinese and Amdo Tibetan
belong to the Sino-Tibetan family, and the Mongolic and Turkic languages belong
to the Altaic family1.
Tangwang Township is located within Dongxiang (Santa) Autonomous County
in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province, China. Its longitude is
103º32’, and its latitude is 35º47’. It is located along the downstream section of the
Tao River, situated between mountains. The altitude ranges from more than 1,000
m to 1,700 m. Tangwang has a total area of 46 km2, and is 8 km from east to west
and 10 km from north to south.

1
The term “Altaic family” is routinely accepted by some linguists but strongly rejected by others.
Here this term continues to be used in a Sprachbund sense.
Introduction xv

Linxia Hui autonomous prefecture in Gansu, China

Map of Tangwang

The Tangwang language was first reported in an article by Chen Yuanlong

(Ibrahim 1985) in the journal Minzu Yuwen [Non-Han languages]. It has been
described by Chinese linguists as a “mixed language” (Sun et al. [eds.] 2007) based
solely on the mentioned article published in the Minzu Yuwen. This language was
almost unknown among researchers in the West because not all linguists read
articles in Chinese. Actually the Tangwang language should be divided into two
varieties, one spoken by converts to Islam (called Hui in Tangwang), and the other
by non-Muslims, the remaining Han people (see details in Chaps. 2 , 3 , 4 and 5).
Based on my own field work and research from a linguistic perspective, and on
my book published in 2014 in Chinese, I would like to present the main results of
my studies on this language showing that it is not yet a mixed language. The
Chinese syntactic structure in Tangwang has already been affected by the
Dongxiang (Santa) language which has surrounded the Tangwang people for
hundreds of years, but the Tangwang language remains a Chinese variety, or per-
haps a special variety. It is natural for this book to compare Dongxiang and
Tangwang, but the comparison will be not limited to these two languages.
Tangwang will be also studied in contrast with two other languages, Daohua and
Wutun, which are both considered “mixed languages”. Finally a wider set of lin-
guistic data (Han and non-Han) belonging to different groups and families will be
used in order to observe the status of the Tangwang language with its multiple
aspects and in different dimensions.
xvi Introduction

The aim of the book

This book aims to understand the Tangwang language by studying the surrounding
languages and peoples in Northwestern China. Languages display an impressive
diversity in this region bordering Gansu and Qinghai. In addition to non-Han
languages including Mongolic and Turkic languages, conventionally thought of as
belonging to the Altaic family, the Tibetan languages including Amdo Tibetan and
its dialects, classified into the Sino-Tibetan family, and the Sinitic languages or
Chinese dialects, provide rich samples of language contact—truly a treasure trove
for linguists. However, it would be a regrettable bias to only focus on the Tangwang
language without comparing it with neighboring languages. Tangwang is located in
a famous anthropological corridor where migrations have occurred non-stop for
centuries. In this region Han and non-Han languages influence one another, and
loans go back and forth. Some of these languages are replaced languages, since
their forefathers’ languages were abandoned, and some are mixed languages due to
long contact with other languages. Today several languages are at an intermediate
phase. They are influenced by other languages but they are not mixed, or are not
completely mixed. Some others only occasionally borrow from neighboring lan-
guages. The book compares Tangwang with other languages in this region, and
especially with languages which are considered “mixed languages”. Thus, previous
linguistic works are valuable for the present book since there is much variability in
the number of publications on these languages. These works have been consulted
along with my own fieldwork in Gansu Province at different sites (Tangwang,
Yongdeng, and Yugur Autonomous County in Sunan, and Huangnipu in Jiuquan).
To complete our aim, an interdisciplinary approach seems to be the most
appropriate. An approach based on molecular anthropology will be introduced and
applied to speakers of different languages to better grasp the evolution of their
languages. This recent research in biology will be exploited from a linguistic point
of view but not from a purely biological one. Genetic studies and reports on this
region are abundant. They also show a remarkable diversity over the populations
residing in this zone. Correlations between languages and people are clear in some
places, but less so or not at all in others. The book will compare both sets of data
where possible. Like linguistic data, genetic information about populations is
sometimes lacking or completely unavailable. This book will compensate for these
gaps using historical records and documents which provide hints in establishing a
coherent scenario of languages and people. Statistics will also be used to quantify
the linguistic data, in an attempt to understand the degrees of language admixture.
In previous studies, some languages have been called “mixed languages” without
really giving a quantified criterion to permit other researchers to verify the con-
clusion. This book tries to remedy this defect, making the data quantifiable in order
to provide a somewhat more reliable criterion for the degree of language admixture.
It must be noted that linguistics is not mathematics. Statistics may provide us with a
tendency which is indicative and often approximate. Still, quantified data is always
better than impressionistic data in providing a coherent sketch of language change.
Introduction xvii

Organization of the book

The book contains six chapters. Chapters 1 , 2 , and 6 consist of my recent

research including current studies on linguistic and genetic data. Chapters 3 – 5
comprise a summary of main results drawn from the book (2014) by the same
author on the Tangwang language initially written in Chinese.
Chapter 1 presents the situation in the Gansu-Qinghai area, with a concrete
corpus, indicating the existence of a linguistic area. The molecular anthropological
approach will be presented to explain why this discipline is beneficial to linguistic
research and how people can take advantage of it in this region. Recent genetic
studies have been used in the target region. As Tangwang is influenced by
Dongxiang (Santa), a member of the Mongolic languages, four neighbouring lan-
guages and genetic data relative to these four languages have been compared to
study the (mis)match between languages and genes. It argues based on interdisci-
plinary perspectives that language replacement and admixture have occurred in this
region. Two models of language replacement have been studied: the Elite
Dominance Model (Renfrew 1987, Cavalli-Sforza 1997 among others) and the
Cultural Dominance Model (Xu and Wen 2017b). In the first model, populations
are forced by a dominating group to change their language. This model tends to
favor language replacement, speeding up the process of change. In the second
model, a small governing group as well as a larger ethnic population accepts a
neighboring language on a voluntary basis due to cultural, religious and other social
and political factors. A bilingual situation facilitates code-switching and admixture,
and it can end with language replacement.
Chapter 2 describes the geographic, historic and religious context in which the
Tangwang people live. This background is crucial to understanding the unique
evolution of their language. Historical documents including those found in the Qing
Dynasty archives (dating to the 18th century) have been exploited, as well as
legends, family genealogies (oral and written), and other sources. The work has
adopted an approach of proving an event not only with written documents but also
with concrete material such as engraved steles, surviving temples, and ancestral
remains. The chapter has taken biological research results to identify population
migrations in the past. By comparing statistics from 1988, 1996 and 2010, it is
shown that more and more people have begun to self-identify as Dongxiang.
However, they were actually Hui (Muslims). Moreover, these Muslims were in fact
Han (Chinese) people who converted to Islam at different periods. It is shown,
through several case studies of vocabulary, that the Tangwang people’s ancestors
mainly came from Northern China. Several words have followed a cyclic path: they
were first loaned from Ancient Chinese into Dongxiang, and have now been
introduced into Tangwang with a non-Han language phonetic form. In addition to
historical and material evidence, results from genetic investigations have been
included in this study. The Tangwang people have multiple origins, but their core
came from Han (Chinese) people.
xviii Introduction

Chapter 3 gives an extensive description and analysis of the Tangwang lan-

guage’s phonological system. Tangwang has 23 consonants and 8 vowels. The
system is purely Chinese, and it displays regular patterns of sound change just as in
other Northwestern Chinese varieties, even though the Tangwang language has
begun to lose its tones in monosyllable words among young Hui (Muslim). It is
interesting to observe that Hui (Muslims) speakers first began to lose tones due to
the influence of the Dongxiang people, while those who are not converts have
preserved the tones but are in the process of losing them, and the degree of loss
varies from Han (Chinese) people to Hui people (converted from Han). Languages
which are losing tones are all concentrated in the Gansu-Qinghai border regions.
We must ask why. The Han people are surrounded by Mongolic and Turkic lan-
guages speakers, and sometimes by Amdo languages speakers. These toneless
languages have profoundly impacted the Sinitic languages in this region and dis-
tinctive tones have started to become ambiguous or even non-functional. This fact
provides a strong counterexample to the traditional point of view that distinctive
tones are obligatory in a language like Chinese.
Chapter 4 treats the morphology of Tangwang, analyzing word formation, case
marking, and some suffixes borrowed from Mongolic languages. The Tangwang
language borrowed its case system from the Dongxiang language, while Chinese is
a morphologically poor language. The most frequently used accusative/dative
marker [xa] phonetically has nothing to see with the Dongxing language, nor with
other Mongolic languages. The case system is from Mongolic languages but the
phonetic form came from Chinese (see Xu 2015). One amazing phenomenon is that
Hui people in Tangwang have borrowed some suffixes typically belonging to
common Mongolic languages, whereas people who have not converted to Islam
have not yet adopted these foreign elements. These borrowed suffixes from
Dongxiang have been simplified in Tangwang. Some borrowed Arabic, Persian and
Turkic words have entered the Tangwang language through the Dongxiang
language.
Syntax has been studied in Chap. 5 with a focus on word order. This is a core
part of any language. In Tangwang, the word order is predominantly SOV
(subject-object-verb), an order which is also found in Altaic and Tibetan languages,
while SVO is also accepted in some cases (recall that the word order in Chinese is
SVO). Actually the language of the Tangwang’s forefathers might have had SVO
order. Traces of VO can be found mainly in VO compound words. This suggests
that language change is still in progress. Under lateral pressure from Dongxiang and
Chinese, some hybrid structures have started to appear which use grammatical
constructions from two languages. This phenomenon is also attested in other
locations in the Gansu-Qinghai area. The aspect system indeed came from Chinese
but was colored by the Dongxiang language so that an existing aspect particle in
Chinese shares syntactic properties with Dongxiang.
The last chapter deals with some theoretical issues such as the degree of contact
between languages and advantages versus limits of quantification. The degree of
admixture will be discussed. Though tentative, this is an experiment towards
quantified data comparison in language contact studies. It is confirmed that the
Introduction xix

Tangwang language is not yet a mixed language as several linguists have proposed.
Statistics are drawn over two distinct types of borrowing, one on the lexical level
and one on the syntactic level. It will be shown that lexical borrowing does not have
the same impact on language admixture as syntactic borrowing does. Six language
samples are chosen to be studied. Then these languages are compared with other
languages on the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Twenty-two
languages belonging to the Altaic language family and the Sino-Tibetan family are
tested for ninety-six features. The conclusion is unequivocal: the result over three
levels (phonological, morphological and syntactic) is similar to syntactic borrowing
tests in classifying these languages. It argues that syntactic borrowing triggers
language admixture, but not lexical borrowing, even if it is heavy.