A dialect found out of China

[Dr_aggie]

Not all Chinese dialects are written in Chinese characters! The Donggan (Dungan), a Chinese dialect spoken in part of Kyrgyzstan, adopts Russian alphabets.
There are still some controversial views about whether Donggan is really a dialect of Chinese. However, most linguists advocate the idea.

The ancestors of Donggan were Muslims living in Shaanxi and Gansu of west China in Qing dynasty. Due to religious conflicts, they moved to today's Kyrgyzstan. Losing contact with Chinese people, their language evolved slowly, and somewhat differently compared to its counterpart in west China. Moreover, they lost the writing system.
However, it is reported that their language is still communal understandable with Shaanxi dialect of today. The following the their pronuciation of numbers, from 1 to 10:

yi lyong san si vu lju chi ba jyu shi

You may comment it is really close to Beijing, noting lyong=liang(两).

Interestingly, because China is getting more and more powerful, the people of Donggan are abandoning many words borrowed from Russian and adopting new words from Chinese. At the same time, they use more modern Chinese words instead of those derived from their ancestors. e.g. The broadcasting stopped saying hao zai de (好再的), with the substitution of zai jian (再见).

[Dr_aggie]

typo here "The following the their pronuciation of numbers"

Should be "The following is the pronunciation of numbers."
Sorry

[Willy Wang]

That's very interesting.

If the Donggan pronounciation of their numbers is exactly as you claim then I don't see how people can say it ISN'T a Chinese dialect.

People adopt different writing systems throughout history depending on who's the strongest power around them at different times. For example, China has historically been a world superpower. Many neighboring countries (Japan, Korea, Vietnam... etc.) adopted Hanzi (Chinese characters) as their writing system. Today, the United States is the world's most influencial country and that's why the newest Chinese "spelling" (romanization) system, Hanyu Pinyin, uses roman letters, but that doesn't mean Chinese isn't Chinese anymore.

Anyway, if you have more information regarding this issue, please post some links. I'm very interested. Thanks.

[Dr_aggie]

李德洙 东干文化研究 1999

Also you can find something with google

[JCampbell]

Yes Dungan is a Chinese dialect. You will find better (and more) information in Russian on this subject. It has three tones. Try searching at APORT:

[http://sm.aport.ru/scripts/template.dll ... 067;К]

(If the characters don't appear correct at the end of that URL, they should be Russian letters: dunganskiy+jazyk

[Dr_aggie]

Yes, Russian linguistics did a lot of research in this area.
It is interesting that Dungan has 3 tones. At present, some dialects found in northwest China have 3 tones, but most have 4 or 5.

[sheetha]

People adopt different writing systems throughout history depending on who's the strongest power around them at different times. For example, China has historically been a world superpower.