Dungan radio broadcasts from 2018-2021
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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]
Scott P. said,
June 15, 2025 @ 2:55 pm
I would think that for a linguist, not being able to understand a language is the start, not the end, of a research project.
cameron said,
June 15, 2025 @ 3:56 pm
I agree with Scott P. above, that is a bafflingly lame reason to scrap a research project
Weh said,
June 15, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
>Note the natural, easy, undistorted insertion of non-Sinitic borrowings
I think that the ability of Dungan (or other alphabetically written Sinitic languages) to adapt borrowings without distortion is overestimated. In writing, Soviet Cyrillic orthographies for the minority languages tend to preserve the spelling of Russian loanwords, but in reality, the loanwords are adapted according to the phonology of the recipient language, especially in speech of monoligual speakers. See this Wikipedia article in Russian for examples: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дунганский_язык#Лексика (it cites 林濤《東干語調查研究》, which uses Cyrillic, IPA and characters for Dungan, so the difference between spelling and pronunciation is evident there).
The announcer in these broadcasts is, like most Dungans, bilingual in Dungan and Russian, and maybe also Kyrghyz. She starts her broadcast (the last one in the list, on 22.02.2021) with the following:
Саламатсызбы, урматтуу радио угуучулар.
Бишкек фәдини.
Ас-Саламу Алейкум.
Ходини ма, гуйҗун пын-ю му?
The first line is in Kyrghyz ("Greetings to you, dear radio listeners"). The second line is in Dungan: "This is Bishkek speaking", with the word Бишкек unadapted; the Dungan part is 説的呢 in characters. The last line is purely Dungan, 好的呢嗎，貴重朋友們？ "Are you well, dear friends?". (Note the Dungan and generally NW Mandarin present tense marker -дини -的呢, which is obligatory here, unlike in Bejing Mandarin, where present tense phrases are usually unmarked)
These broadcasts are not representative of "real" Dungan, since they involve heavy code-switching, and even the intonations are mimicking those used by Russian announcers. The male speaker later in the broadcast has much less of these Russian intonations, but his speech is still clearly influenced by Russian.
Victor Mair said,
June 15, 2025 @ 10:32 pm
I was talking about the impact of alphabetic writing versus the impact of sinographic writing — in terms of versatility and fidelity to speech.
We've discussed the gap between spoken and sinographically written language countless times on Language Log.
Beijing Mandarin is irrelavant for the Dungans. It's not a standard for their language.
In comparison with the sinographic script, the ability of Dungan (or other alphabetically written Sinitic languages) to represent speech, including borrowings, without distortion is not overestimated.
Victor Mair said,
June 15, 2025 @ 11:03 pm
@Scott P and cameron:
I think that Professor Wang was not prepared for how linguistically different Dungan is from MSM and how influenced it has been by Islamic thought and expression.