User:Brady.Williamss/Eastern Yugur Language

Eastern Yugur is the Mongolic language spoken within the Yugur nationality. This community is located in the Gansu Province in Northwestern China. It is also known as Shira Yughur, Enger, Shira Yugur, Shera Yogur, Eastern Yogor, Yogor, Yögur, Yugu, Yugar, Yellow Uighur, Šera-Yögur, and Mongolic Yellow Uighur. It is currently estimated to be spoken by about 4,000 native speakers. It is thought to be going extinct in part due to the absence of a written form of the language. This makes it difficult for the language to be taught and protected. The other language spoken within the same community is Western Yughur, which is a Turkic language. The terms may also indicate the speakers of these languages, which are both non-written. Traditionally, both languages are indicated by the term Yellow Uygur, from the autonym of the Yugur. Some members of the Yugur community speak Han. Eastern Yugur speakers are said to have passive bilingualism with Southern Mongolian, the standard spoken in China.

Eastern Yugur is a threatened language with an aging population of fluent speakers. Language contact with neighboring languages, particularly Chinese, has noticeably affected the language competency of younger speakers. Some younger speakers have also begun to lose their ability to distinguish between different phonetic shades within the language, indicating a weaker language competency.

The Eastern and Western Yugur people are culturally and linguistically distinct. They both have their roots in nomadic lifestyles and lived this way up until the 2000's when Chinese policy resulted in nomadic people finding permanent residency in respective areas. For both Eastern and Western Yugur people their home became the Gansu region of China.

The Yugur people are generally agreed to have descended from the Huiqu nomadic tribe. This tribe left their Mongolian homelands in the mid 800's due to weather. After this exodus, the Yugur people came under the control of the Tibetan people. This separation allowed the Yugur people to develop their own distinct culture separate from that of the Mongols and the Tibetans. Throughout the eleventh through sixteenth century the Yugur people moved further West and outside the Great Wall. During this period they hunted, herded, and traded with many different groups of people. During the later part of the sixteenth century the Turfan people became more aggressive. This resulted in the Yugur moving east within the Great Wall for the purposes of safety.

The Yugur people are separated into nine separate tribes. Seven of these tribes are ruled by one datomu (great chief). The other two tribes would operate independently. Due to the latter two tribes not falling under rule of the datomu they mainly interacted with each other as opposed to the other two tribes.

The Yugur people, similar to Tibetans, practice sky burials. Sky burials involve the deceased being placed on high mountaintops for birds to prey upon and nature to decompose. The Yugur people predominantly practice Tibetan Buddhism.

Nomadic lifestyles influence the evolution of the language of their people heavily. This influence often takes one of two forms. Either the language acts as a snowball, picking up influences from the multiple languages the people encounter, or the language undergoes less changes than those experienced by languages of more permanently settled peoples. The case of an unchanging language for nomadic people can be attributed to those people not being impacted by forces that target nations and impact nation's languages. This is the case for the Bedouin people who are believed to speak the purest form of Classical Arabic. East Yugur shows signs of significant influence from other languages. While a Mongolian language, East Yugur has many words with Arabic origin and some Persian loanwords.

After settling permanently in the Gansu region of China the Eastern Yugur people began experiencing a decline in the amount of people in their population who are able to distinguish between different phonetic shades within the language. A higher rate of bilingualism is also present and growing as more Eastern Yugur people are fluent in both East Yugur and Mandarin.

The continuation of Eastern Yugur people speaking the language may be in danger due in part to Chinese government policies that are currently in place regarding education. Chinese policy in the past has allowed for those who speak minority languages to educate their youth with this language. That policy is no longer in place and all schools in China, including those in Gansu, are obliged to teach strictly in Mandarin. This policy has resulted in a greater majority of Chinese people speaking Mandarin and being able to communicate with each other. It has also resulted in East Yugur youth being less familiar with the Eastern Yugur language.

Despite these laws, certain groups have been working to save the East Yugur language through coordinated efforts of education through schools. These schools have not been targeted by the Chinese government and have been allowed to continue. There have been, to this point, five main efforts at integrating language education in schools. The first two of these efforts have been considered failures. However, the most recent three efforts are still ongoing and currently remain successful. The first effort took place from November of 1983 through July of 1984. It aimed at education during the primary and secondary level at Huangnipu Primary/Secondary School. The second effort took place from September 2003 through July 2004. It aimed at education at only the primary level at Hongwan Primary School. The third effort began in September 2007 and is still ongoing. It is educating at the Ganshu County Kindergarten. A fourth effort began in September 2012 and is still ongoing. This effort aimed again at education at the primary level at Hongwan Primary school. Unlike the 2003 education attempt at Hongwan Primary school this ongoing effort is only for those at the first and second grade level. The fifth effort begain in September 2016 and still ongoing. This effort is taking place at all levels at Ganshu County and Regional Schools. This effort is mainly attributed to Yugur Education Academy (YEA). A majority of the funding for these programs comes from charity sponsorship.

Failure in the original two iterations of the education program has mainly been attributed to five separate factors; lack of community recognition of the value of the language, lack of teaching resources or references, lack of trained language teachers, language as an extra-curricular, and lack of extensive local county government support. The combination of these factors made it difficult for language education to succeed in the region. The detriment of these factors was heightened due to the lack of a written language specific to East Yugur.

The success of the three most recent efforts of the language education programs has been attributed to five other factors; obligatory attendance, parent support for kindergarten (fluent relatives often came in to teach/interact), strong support from local community academics, advocates, and school principles, strong support from the Yugur Education Academy, and quota of language teachers in 2015 assigned by the local government. The obligatory attendance of the recent programs directly opposed the language as an extra-curricular approach of the first two attempts. Strong support from the community, local government, and and Yugur Education Academy was not present originally and proved to be a vital part of the success of the most recent three language education efforts.

The Yugur Education Academy is the main reason the most recent language education at Ganshu County and Regional Schools was started and is still continuing. The Yugur Education Academy organizes teachers and their training. This allows the language education to be similar across schools despite difficulty of standardization due to the lack of a written language. In 2016, the Yugur Education Academy began developing a Yugur language education curriculum to be carried out from kindergarten through secondary level education. In 2018, this curriculum was implemented in a trial version at all schools that teach East Yugur as a language. This trial version of the curriculum is still in use currently.

The 2015 quota was implemented in order to ensure there are native language speakers teaching the curriculum. The quota successfully recruited three East Yugur speakers as well as two West Yugur speakers and one Tibetan speaker. All of the recruited instructors were young university graduates but did not specialize in education. They were given over six months of training which included language data collection, basic transcription, grammar, and teaching material. They were assigned by the Yugur Education Academy to schools in the region and began teaching in 2016 in concurrence with the 2016 language education effort.

Grigory Potanin recorded a glossary of Salar, Western Yugur, and Eastern Yugur in his 1893 book written in Russian, The Tangut-Tibetan Borderlands of China and Central Mongolia.

Phonology
The phonemes /ç, çʰ, ɕ, ɕʰ, ʂ, ʑ/ appear exclusively in Chinese loanwords. Vowel length is also distributed.