micro blog: Mandarin & Uyghur

Languages defy geopolitical borders. We know this. So we know that we can expect micro-diasporas around the world where languages crop up in places that we might not expect them. The inverse of that, however, is that there are some languages that dominate specific regions, leaving little windows for smaller, often non-native languages to flourish alongside them. One of these massive languages that we can attribute to a specific part of the world is Mandarin, a Sinitic language (and the largest in the world) spoken by nearly 1 billion native speakers. Mandarin is a form of Chinese, itself a language with various iterations, including Cantonese, Wu, and Yue. Mandarin is a complex language which employs such distinct grammatical features as tonality and isolating morphology. 

Mandarin is a global linguistic superpower. Because it's so well-known, however, it easily overshadows lesser-known languages spoken throughout China, like Uyghur, a Turkic language spoken in Western China in the Xinjiang Province. Most native Uyghur speakers are Muslim, and this ethnic identity constitutes an extreme minority of Chinese individuals. An estimated 80 percent of the Chinese population speak Mandarin. A sliver of its populace speaks Uyghur.

There are plenty of typological differences between Mandarin Chinese and Uyghur. For example, whereas Uyghur language structures its sentences in a subject-object-verb word order, Mandarin is similar to English in its subject-verb-object construction. Also, Mandarin Chinese uses a different writing script than Uyghur, one that it shares with all other spoken Chinese languages. This perhaps creates a certain 'Otherness' to Uyghur, as it's surrounded to the east by hundreds of millions of people who can all read and write the same script, one that is not the same as Uyghur's Arabic alphabet.

Though the two are disparate in form and sound, Uyghur does borrow some of its lexicon from Chinese. Han Woo Choi wrote in Central Asiatic Journal enumerates loanwords which had previously not been recorded in glosses of Chinese loan words in Uyghur. Some of these include...

• sïn (Uyghur) 'the human body' – sien (Chinese) 'body'
• tïng (Uyghur) 'precious stone, jade' – teng (Chinese) 'precious stone'
• yung (Uyghur) 'cotton' – nyung (Chinese) 'silk floss, wool'
• ton (Uyghur) 'clothing' – t'ung (Chinese) 'skirt, clothes of a barbarian'

This last entry is noteworthy to me. I wonder if the the Chinese word t'ung came about from Chinese folks witnessing Uyghurs, and conceiving of them as barbarous. As tensions flare between the Han Chinese (who mostly speak Mandarin) and the Uyghurs, evidence of their longstanding conflict can be found within their respective vocabularies.

CHOI, Han Woo. “On Some Chinese Loan Words in Uighur.” Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 32, no. 3/4, 1988, pp. 161–169. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41927884. Accessed 12 May 2021.

'Over 80 percent of Chinese population speak Mandarin.' http://en.people.cn/n3/2020/1016/c90000-9769716.html