Uyghurish Mandarin and shrike-tongued barbarians
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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:
-
——————————————————————————–
- 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.]
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
- "Pushing Pekingese" (11/10/13) — bird language
- "From 'barbarian' to 'very'" (5/27/17)
- "Barbarian Language in a Chinese movie" (9/20/20)
- "American English pronunciation of Uyghur proper nouns" (7/15/09)
- "A Little Primer of Xinjiang Proper Nouns" (7/13/09)
- "Uyghur as a 'dialect' — NOT" (10/1/13)
[Thanks to John Rohsenow]
Chris Button said,
November 20, 2025 @ 8:20 pm
I was going through the phonetic permutations in my head and concluded that this could work. But then I quickly googled Uyghur phonology and found that a velar nasal is apparently used in coda position. So, I'm wondering what it is about the conditioning environment that makes it a challenge in this case?
anon said,
November 20, 2025 @ 8:40 pm
Would Chinese be considered a language without definitive word classes? Any Chinese monosyllabic morpheme is a lexical base or a contentive morpheme and can function whatever, as "verb", "noun", and "adjective". The so called many "meanings" of a Chinese words should be better described as referential, predicative, and attributive semantics. In clause, these contentive morphemes, still without received a determined role yet, interact with each other in a syntactic array forming a syntagma, which functions equivalently to "noun phrase" ("referential-syntagma") or "verb phrase" (predicative syntagma) depending on word order and contexts…
bks said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:02 am
"Shrike-tongued"?
Philip Taylor said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:05 am
Perhaps because :
Victor Mair said,
November 21, 2025 @ 7:08 am
@anon
Thanks for your profound questions about word classes that need to be answered / faced..
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 7:52 am
I am no syntactician, but just looking at how copulas may or may not function or be needed across languages is enough to make my head spin.
Yves Rehbein said,
November 21, 2025 @ 3:02 pm
@ Chris Button, there's the question about lambdacizm in Turkic languages. I rembered it faintly and … am confused (three paragraphs omitted).
Jaques has and you yourself have commented on the matter, Proto-Turkic consonants:
Since I have no reason to believe that "apple u" is an ancient pronounciation, and sigmatism is against it, I am left to conclude that it is a northern form taught to Uyghurs. But things are not that simple.
Yves Rehbein said,
November 21, 2025 @ 3:15 pm
@ anon, it is widely held that any language has nouns and verbs. If there is a different view, it does not have to pivot on Sinitic. English can the everything, on the go. We verb nouns and noun verbs (according to one xkcd). From a lexicographical point of view, these are polysems or, sometimes, true homonyms. Sinitic writing may have a different idea about homographs. And I have no idea about theories of syntax. But I do not see any relation to the topic.
Jonathan Smith said,
November 21, 2025 @ 4:03 pm
The pseudo-Uyghur "ai pengyou"s on the internet (lots) don't seem to use a lateral, so the "apple u" thing is just for "fun" (and suggests mostly and ironically that Chinese speakers struggle with "apple" etc., using Mandarin /ai/ instead of /æ/.)
And the larger meme is not about pronunciation (where the imitators put on a country NW Mandarin re: tones/vowels) but about syntax — the joke such as it is (with more and less sophisticated examples/explanations) is about Mandarin content words plugged into Uyghur argument-rolesuffix….verb type frames.
安森垚's 馕言文 video is actually reasonably involved for those with 8ish minute patience…
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:57 pm
@ Yves Rehbein
I'm not sure how it helps here, but I do have two comments in regard to that Old Turkic thread:
– A change of ɬ to s is well attested
– Old Chinese 銀 ᵑgʳə̀n "silver" seems to connect well with Tocharian nkiñc / ñkante (as Johaness Rahder suggested)
Regarding the phonetic motivation in the case here, I was ruminating on things like the following:
– An association of ŋ with w (e.g., how Middle Chinese -əŋ gave Sino-Japanese -ə̃w)
– An association of ɫ with w (e.g. the "l" in "Brasil" in Portuguese or "bottle" in Cockney)
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 9:59 pm
Johaness > Johannes
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:05 pm
Yes, I think it mostly starts to get messy when people start forcing ideas of "adjectives" and "adverbs" onto languages that clearly cannot be analyzed in such terms.
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 22, 2025 @ 3:13 am
Why the shrike specifically? Is it just due to the bird’s call sounding harsh to Sinitic speakers? Is “shrike-tongued” a common insult or were other birds also similarly implicated? I’m wondering if there was an auditory resemblance between the Old Chinese words for “shrike” and “Yue” that would have led to this word being chose here. Wiktionary says 越 (“Yue”) was read *ɢʷaːd or *ɢʷad in Old Chinese, while 鴃 (“shrike”) was read *kʰʷraːds or *kʷeːd. That seems close enough for some clever wordplay, at least to a shrike-tongued barbarian like myself.