User:Yanqin Li/Monguor language

The Monguor language (also written Mongour and Mongor). According to the generally accepted system of language classification in China, Monguor belongs to the Hehuang branch of the Mongolian language family together with Dongxiang, Baoan and Yogur, each of which is spoken in eastern Qinghai and its adjacent areas by the titular ethnic group. The Hehuang Mongolian languages, having branched off from the development of Mongolian proper probably before Middle Mongolian, did not inherit the tradition of written Mongolian nor any other writing system. Monguor falls into three main dialects: Huzhu, Minhe and Tongren; these are reportedly not mutually intelligible at first hearing.

The vitality of the Monguor languages is presently undergoing rapid decline. Both Mangghuer (∼30,00023 speakers) and Mongghul (∼50,000 speakers) are shifting towards Chinese, whereas Bonan (∼4,000 speakers amongst the Monguor) is shifting towards Amdo Tibetan.

History
The Monguors are one of China's fifty-five officially recognised minorities.' They live in eastern Qinghai and in the neighbouring parts of Kansu province. Since the 1980s, there have been efforts among Monguor nationality leaders to provide the Monguor language, a traditionally unwritten language, with a writing system. Another aim has been to introduce Monguor mother tongue education into schools.

Southeastern Mongolian is also a Mongolian language that uses a raised pitch melody on the last syllable of a word to indicate boundary. the loss of segmental distinctions has led to simple pitch distinctions in some other senses of homophonic word pairs in that language. This is unusual for Mongolian, where the tone is usually not obvious and serves to signal boundaries and to highlight particular parts of an utterance. In Mongolian, such boundary tones are often referred to as accents. In Mongolian, including in Southeastern Mongolian, the accent is not contrastive.

Phonology
In the Mongolian language, the nasal vowel is also fully nasalized.

There are reportedly two dialects of Mongolian. Their place names are Hùzhù and Mínhé. In this grammar, the Mongolian dialect items are provided in the Hùzhù dialect version, represented by the IPA derivation system. The Mangghuer vowel system has five short vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, perhaps six if one counts /ə/ as a separate phoneme. Incidental vowel lengths survive.

The Monguor words recorded were collected from Monguor people of Gansu and Qinhai Provinces of China. The listing 426 words are composed of only monosyllabic words because the internodes of polysyllabic words have mutual influence on coarticulation. There are 34 Monguor words which contain the nasal vowel [ɑ̃] and 37 Monguor words containing the nasal vowel [ɔ̃]. These words consist  of  monosyllable,  disyllable,  trisyllable,  and quadrisyllable words. The nasal vowels must appear at the end of a syllable.