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We have mentioned the Dungan people and their unique language many times on Language Log.  How did it happen that we at Penn have a connection with the Dungans, a small group (less than a hundred thousand) of Sinitic speakers who have lived in the center of Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) since the latter part of the 19th century?  They fled there from northwest China, many of them dying along the way, after revolting against the Manchu Qing government.

When, in the 70s, I found out that the Dungans had been illiterate in China, but, with the help of the Russians, they gained literacy in Cyrillic, I became very interested in them because it proved something I had been saying since the late 60s when I started learning Mandarin, namely, you don't need sinographs to write Sinitic languages.  Consequently, I made a special trip to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to study how their written language worked.  I discovered that, not only did it enable the Dungans to swiftly attain literacy in their own language, it also enabled them effortlessly to borrow Persian, Arabic, and Russian words into Dungan, and through these languages, also French, German, and other languages.  Oh, yes, they acquired Turkic terms too.

I wrote articles and blogs about the Dungans and their language, and gave talks about them at many venues.  I also brought the first (so far as I know) Dungan speaker to America.  His name was Sushanlo, a famous poet.  I was intrigued by his name, because it seemed to mask three Sinitic syllables.  After lengthy discussions with him, we finally figured out that it was equal to Shísānlǎo 十三老 ("Old Thirteen").

Sushanlo was accompanied by the distinguished Russian folklorist and Sinologist, Boris Riftin, who spoke Mandarin with a strong Dungan accent, because he had spent a considerable amount of time among the Dungans.

For those of you who have been following the thread of posts and comments about "How to transcribe the name of the ruler of the PRC" (11/4/25), you will remember that one of the respondents was a Dungan, and she had transcribed "Xi Jinping" in Cyrillic Dungan, viz., Си Дзиньпин.  That was Lola Iusupova, where Russian specialists can probably recognize her surname as a Slavic patronymic.  Thereby hangs a tale.

Several months ago, near the beginning of the semester, I heard a knock on my door.  When I opened the door, a tall, graceful woman introduced herself, saying, "Hello, I am Lola Iusupova, a Dungan Fulbright scholar who will be here at Penn for the next year."

I almost fainted.

What fate brought her to Penn?

I think she probably similarly must have fainted when she realized that VHM was here.

As we say in Chinese when such miraculous things happen, "Yǒuyuán 有緣" ("fated").  Lola Iusupova didn't know I was here when she was assigned by Fulbright to come to Penn, and I didn't know anything about her coming until she knocked on my door.

Fulbright must have done their homework.

Selected readings

• "Dungan, a Sinitic language of Central Asia written in the Cyrillic Alphabet" (6/14/21)
• "Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13)
• "The look, feel, and sound of Dungan language" (10/15/20)
• "'Jesus' in Dungan" (7/16/14)
• "Dungan-English dictionary" (10/26/18) — online here
• "Pinyin in practice" (10/13/11), esp. these two comments (here and here).
• "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
• "Sinitic languages without the Sinographic script" (3/5/19)
• "Dungan radio broadcasts from 2018-2021" (6/15/25)

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.

• Rostislav Berezkin, "Academician Boris L’vovich Riftin (1932–2012): The Extraordinary Life of a Brilliant Scholar", CHINOPERL Papers, 31 (2012), 259-272.
• Victor H. Mair, "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 18 (May, 1990) (free pdf).
• "Chinese-Russian Muslims:  the Dungan people", StephenJones.blog (4/13/20) — featuring the work of Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer, great-granddaughter of the composer
• Wikipedia — people, language
• Omniglot

November 7, 2025 @ 7:05 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Borrowing, Romanization

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