The Dungan (Khuejzu) Language of Central Asia: The Development of an Endangered "Chinese" Minority Language

The first two years of the project have mainly been used to map the language situation of the Dungans in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. This process has consisted in the collection of source materials, not least during field work in Central Asia. Collaboration with Chinese, Russian and Dungan researchers has been an imporant part of the work, thus providing the project with a reliable theoretical and empirical basis. Particularly Russian lexicology, Chinese dialectology, and Dungan folklore studies play an imporant role. This collaboration has taken place during research and field trips as well as during two international workshops and one conference at the University of Oslo in 2013 and 2014. More international cooperation on Dungan was in evidence during a workshop on the marginal languages of the Silk Road, organized by the project leader at the University of Oslo in September 2015. Hence the results of the first phase of the project were broadly speaking a preliminary investigation of fundamental questions relating to the language situation of the Dungans, in addition to a rich collection of new source materials for Dungan language, primary as well as secondary. After the first 18 months the project entered a new phase: a thorough linguistic and historical analysis of the sources. This work is now about to be concluded, and will published in early 2016 in the form of two articles -- one on language history and one on the linguistic form of Dungan folklore texts. Work on a lexical database of Dungan is proceeding steadily, and an early version of the dictionary is already available to users on the web.

This project seeks to explain how a Chinese dialect came to function as a Soviet minority language known as "Dungan", and further to reconsider current models of language development in the light of the results. The primary objective is thus to lay the gr oundwork for a history of the Dungan language, taken as a case of language development with global implications. Dungan is a Central Asian minority language known to its speakers as "Khuejzu jüjan". It is basically a Northwestern Mandarin Chinese dialect that was established as an independent minority language in Soviet Central Asia, after Muslim Chinese (Hui) rebels had fled there from China in the late 19th century. Although there is a considerable body of research on Dungan (mostly in Chinese and Russi an), there is no account of the development of the language that is at the same time theoretically engaging and empirically satisfactory. Moreover, few studies address the global implications of this fascinating case. For this project can provide signific ant input to current models of language development as well as theories of linguistic ecology. It will tell us much that is useful about the place of minority languages in multilingual societies. The project also provides a fresh perspective on the histor y of Chinese from the vantage point of an alphabetically written variety of Chinese outside China. Extensive source analysis and linguistic fieldwork with native speakers will ensure that the findings are empirically well-founded. The study will also con tribute to the documentation of this endangered language. It is hoped that the key studies produced by the current project will later lead to a scientific grammar and history of Dungan.