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We've talked about Dungan a lot on Language Log.  That's the northwest Sinitic topolect written in Cyrillic that has been transplanted to Central Asia.  See "Selected readings" below.

For those of you who are interested and would like to hear what it sounds like in real life — spoken and sung by male and female voices — we are fortunate to have a series of ten radio broadcast recordings (here).

Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings, e.g., "Salam alaikum" (Arabic as-salāmu ʿalaykum  السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ ("Peace be upon you").  That would not be possible in sinographic transcription of northwest Sinitic speech.  This and other aspects and implications of alphabetic Dungan have been extensively discussed on LL.

After I brought Dungan speakers to America and wrote about them in Sino-Platonic Papers (no. 18, May 1990) and elsewhere four decades ago, they caught the attention of Berkeley professor William S-Y. Wang, to the extent that he organized a research trip to Kazakhstan / Kyrgyzstan where the Dungans live.  He was hoping to have one of his graduate students write her Ph.D. dissertation on Dungan.  Unfortunately, he had to give up on that plan because he said that neither he nor his graduate student could understand Dungan speech.

Selected readings

• "The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language" (10/15/20)
• "Dungan-English dictionary" (10/26/18)
• "Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13)
• "Dungan, a Sinitic language of Central Asia written in the Cyrillic Alphabet" (6/14/21)
• "'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14)
• "'Thanks' in Hakka and other Sinitic topolects" (2/15/25)
• "'Onion' in Persian, Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu, Dungan (northwest Mandarin), and Indic" (3/21/20)
• "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
• "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" (3/5/19)
• "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers,  18 (May, 1990)
• Omniglot
• Wikipedia:  "Dungan people", "Dungan language"

[Thanks to IA]

June 15, 2025 @ 7:40 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Topolects, Writing systems

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