What Is The Salar language?

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• published: 06 Sep 2015
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Salar is a Turkic language spoken by the Salar people, who mainly live in the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu in China; some also live in Yining, Xinjiang. The Salar number about 105,000 people, about 60,000 (2002) speak the Salar language; under 20,000 monolinguals. The Salar arrived at their current location in the 14th century, having migrated there from the west, according to a Salar legend from Samarkand. Linguistic evidence points to a possible western Turkic, Oghuz origin of the Salar. Contemporary Salar is heavily influenced by contact with Amdo Tibetan and Chinese. The Salar language is the official language in all Salar autonomous areas. Such autonomous areas are the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County and the Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County. Phonology Although Salar is an Oghuz language, it also received influence from other non-Oghuz Turkic languages like Chagatai., northwestern Turkic and southeastern Turkic. Chinese and Tibetan Influence In Amdo, Salar language has heavy Chinese and Tibetan influence. Although of Turkic origin, major linguistic structures have been absorbed from Chinese. Around 20% of the vocabulary is of Chinese origin, and 10% is also of Tibetan origin. Yet the official Communist Chinese government policy deliberately covers up these influences in academic and linguistics studies, trying to emphasize the Turkic element and completely ignoring the Chinese in the Salar language. The Salar use the Chinese writing system since they do not have their own. The Salar language has taken loans and influence from neighboring varieties of Chinese. It is neighboring variants of Chinese which have loaned words to the Salar language. The Salar use the Chinese writing system since they do not have their own. In Qinghai, many Salar men speak both the Qinghai dialect of Chinese and Salar. Rural Salars can speak Salar fluently while urban Salars often assimilate into the Chinese speaking Hui population. Dialects The Qing deported some Salar who belonged to the Jahriyya Sufi order to the Ili (Yining) valley which is in modern day Xinjiang. Today, a community of a few thousand Salars speaking a distinct dialect of Salar still live in Yining. Salar migrants from Amdo (Qinghai) came to settle the region as religious exiles, migrants, and as soldiers enlisted in the Chinese army to fight rebels in Ili, often following the Hui. The distinctive dialect of the Ili Salar differs from the other Salar dialects because the neighboring Kazakh and Uyghur languages in Ili influenced it. The Ili Salar population numbers around 4,000 people. There have been instances of misunderstanding between speakers of Ili Salar and Qinghai Salar due to the divergence of the dialects. The differences between the two dialect result in a "clear isogloss". Salars use Chinese for written purposes while using Salar language for spoken purposes. Salar used to be written in Arabic script; they still use it at present. There are calls to standardize the Arabic-based script for Salar. Some Salar call for a Latin script, and some Salar elders who dislike the Latin script desire an Arabic script. This lack of an official script has led the Salar to use the Chinese writing system. China offered the Salar an official writing system but it was rejected. The Salar favor the continued use of Chinese characters which shows their "strong attachment to being citizens of the Chinese state". Despite there being an unofficial Latin-script alphabet based on the orthography for Turkic languages for the Salar, the Latin script is unpopular among the Salar and has failed to catch on. Arabic script is much more popular among the Salar.[citation needed] The Arabic script has historical precedent among the Salar; centuries-old documents in the Salar language were written in the Arabic script when discovered. Pinyin based Latin alphabet A romanization of the Mengda dialect of Salar based on pinyin has been developed, created by a Salar, Ma Quanlin, who lives in Xunhua. Like Pinyin, which is used to romanize Mandarin Chinese, this salar romanization is divided into categories of consonants and vowels. Letters that occur both in pinyin and romanization of Mengda Salar share the same sound values.