Uyghurish Mandarin and shrike-tongued barbarians

November 20, 2025 @ 11:41 am · Filed by under Accents, Pronunciation

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I, for one, don't think it's the least bit funny.

Uyghur pronounciation

The way Uyghurs speak Mandarin is now a joke
For many it’s not funny, given the political heat around language choices

Economist (Nov 13th 2025)

The article begins with a viral joke, which Economist doesn't bother to explain (I will, though, at the end of the first paragraph):

Scroll through posts about Xinjiang on Chinese social media and an odd phrase soon appears: “Apple U”. It is a pun that mimics how some Uyghurs, the largest ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a region in China’s far north-west, pronounce “Hey, friend” in Mandarin. This meme is part of a growing trend online for using nang yan wen, or “naan Mandarin”—a way of writing and talking that wags have named after Xinjiang’s staple flatbread. Videos tagged with the term have amassed more than 1.7bn [VHM: !!!] views on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, since the start of the year.

Here's the linguistics of the "Apple u" joke, as explained by Diana Shuheng Zhang:

"Apple u" is a kind of "transliteration" of "哎，朋友" ("Ài, péngyǒu!" — indeed "hey, friend"). Yes the Mandarin-speaking netizens usually use this in a cute, affectionate way of teasing the Uyghur speakers' Mandarin accent — namely, the inability to pronounce velar nasal /ng/ in péng and approximation of this phoneme with the lateral sound /l/ at the end of the syllable. :) Therefore, "a-(p)ple u". 

There are a lot of posts about "apple u" on social media.

Nang yan wen (náng yánwén 馕言文) means "naan language".

Naan (/nɑːn/) is a leavened, oven-baked or tawa-fried flatbread, that can also be baked in a tandoor. It is characterised by a light and fluffy texture and golden-brown spots from the baking process. Naan is found in the cuisines of Iran, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. (Wikipedia)

The Economist article continues:

Mocking regional accents has long been a pastime within China. Mandarin (putonghua) itself was standardised from northern dialects under the country’s past leader Mao Zedong, who famously spoke it with a thick Hunan accent. But what began as gentle parody risks shading into prejudice. State media and online influencers alike deploy “naan Mandarin” in ways that blur the line between comedy and condescension.

I remember from graduate student days learning that northerners (as in Mencius [372-289 BC] 3A.4) referred to the

nánmánjuéshé 南蠻鴃舌 ("shrike-tongued barbarian of the south")

nánmán 南蠻 — "Southern Barbarians", a catch-all term for the Yue and other peoples living south of the Chinese cultural sphere in Antiquity

juéshé 鴃舌 — barbarian gibberish; incomprehensible language or dialect of southern China

From Mencius:

今也南蠻鴃舌之人，非先王之道，子倍子之師而學之，亦異於曾子矣。
——————————————————————————–
Now here is this shrike-tongued barbarian of the south, whose doctrines are not those of the ancient kings. You turn away from your master and become his disciple. Your conduct is different indeed from that of the philosopher Zeng.

Note that in the pre-Qin period when this term was coined, the Chinese language was not spoken in the area known as South China today. See Old Yue language. [VHM:  The latter link is worth a read.]

(Wiktionary)

Back to the Economist:

The meme also glosses over Xinjiang’s fraught linguistic past. In the decades after 1949, schools in autonomous regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet were permitted to teach the main subjects in their local languages. That space narrowed in the 1990s with the introduction of “bilingual education”. After 2000 such teaching grew more institutionalised and under Xi Jinping, China’s president since 2013, language use has increasingly become a political concern.

On his first visit to Xinjiang as China’s leader in 2014, Mr Xi said that mastering Mandarin would make it easier for local children to find jobs and help them “contribute more to promoting ethnic unity”. In 2017 China’s government ordered minority students to “master and use” standard Mandarin; it said it wanted it employed in 95% of classrooms, nationwide. Across many minority regions, subjects such as maths and literature are now taught in Mandarin, despite some protests from parents who fear that their children are losing their mother tongue—and with it, an important part of their identity.

Many children from minority groups now primarily speak Mandarin, so jokes about pronunciation truly sting. Besides, minorities more broadly, and in particular those who carry a Xinjiang hukou (household registration), face regular police checks and frequent discrimination. As a user from the region complained online recently, being addressed in “naan Mandarin” is not affectionate but belittling: “I’m not a child or a pet for you to tease,” the person wrote. “I spent years learning Mandarin so we could speak as equals.”■

To conclude, here is an explanation of "naan language" by Xinyi Ye:

Yes! It's recently popular on Chinese tiktok. People call it náng yánwén 囊言文 ("naan language") (as opposed to wényánwén 文言文 ["Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic"]). It's not only about the accent but also how the phrases are composed. Some sentences are from direct translations from Uyghur proverbs or phrases to mandarin which don't seem to make sense in mandarin. Then, people started to invent phrases that seem like direct translations of Uyghur phrases, but actually have no Uyghur origin. I don't think there is bad intention to portray Uyghurs negatively. It's mostly just a funny internet trend. It does, though, come from a lack of understanding of the Uyghur language and a strange imagination of life in Xinjiang.

Here is a Uyghur influencer explaining in two bilibili videos what this náng yánwén 囊言文 ("naan language") situation is (here and here)

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to John Rohsenow]

November 20, 2025 @ 11:41 am · Filed by under Accents, Pronunciation


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