User:Silmarlu/Eastern yugur language

Eastern Yugur (Shira Yugur, "Yellow Yugur" ) is the Mongolic language spoken within the Yugur nationality in the Gansu Province of China. The other language spoken within the same community is Western Yughur, which is a Turkic language. Both are non-written languages and traditionally indicated by the term Yellow Uygur, from the autonym of the Yugur. There are approximately 4,000 speakers of Eastern Yugur today.

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 first record of Eastern Yugur was made by Grigory Potanin in 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.

Classification
Eastern Yugur is closely related to Monguor, Baoan, and Dongxian. All four preserve the Common Mongolic initial *h- and preserve Common Mongolic final vowels but possess instability of Common Mongolic non-final vowels.

Loanwords
Eastern Yugur shares a large common vocabulary with Western Yugur due to the adoption of loanwords not only from each other but also from the Tibetan and Chinese languages. While words from Western Yugur and Tibetan are regarded as native words, Chinese loanwords are still regarded as foreign as the Chinese only moved into Gansu Province in 1958.

Words from the Turkic-Mongolic cognate vocabulary are also present in both languages as in most modern Mongolic and Turkic languages.

Literature
After the first record of Eastern Yugur was made by Potanin in 1893, more material from Malov's expeditions to Yugur 1909-1911 and 1913-1915 was published in Kotwicz's article. In the 1950s, Sino-Russian research expeditions collected much language material, though these would face a delayed release. Other materials include a grammar with vocabulary and a short article by Juunast, a survey by Tenisev and Todaeva, a collection of texts by Bolculuu and Jalcan, and parts of the Mongolic dictionary by Sun.

Culture
Speakers of Eastern Yugur follow Tibetan Buddhism, in contrast to the shamanistic traditions of speakers of Western Yugur. Both are primarily employed in animal husbandry.

Folksongs
As an unwritten language, folksongs are important in preserving the Eastern Yugur language and culture. In general, both Eastern and Western Yugur folksongs can be divided into narrative songs, wedding songs, pastoral songs, folk songs, hypnotic songs, toddler songs, funeral songs, yehezhe songs, stacker grass songs, songs of feeding young animals, rowing songs, praising songs and missing songs. Notably, Eastern Yugur folksongs are also sung by speakers of Western Yugurs.

Pastoral Songs
Pastoral songs can be further divided by type of livestock, with different songs for lambs, horses, cow calves, camel lambs, etc.

Endangerment
Despite an increasing population of the Yugur nationality, the Eastern Yugur language remains endangered due to an aging population and language contact with neighboring languages. Most fluent speakers of Eastern Yugur are over 60 years old while younger speakers are able to comprehend but not reply back in their mother tongue.

Phonology
The phonemes /ç, çʰ, ɕ, ɕʰ, ʂ, ʑ/ appear exclusively in Chinese loanwords.

Vowel length is also distributed.