Brief Information
Dungan is the language of the Dungan people, who speak a Chinese language called Hui (Huizhou) and who resettled in the territories of modern Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan after the suppression of the Muslim uprising in northwest China in 1862-1877. It belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. In the Soviet Union, during the process of national-state division in Central Asia initiated in 1924, the ethnonym "Dungane" was chosen as the official name for Chinese-speaking Muslim immigrants used in Russian. This term was not known in China. In Xinjiang, it appeared as a name (but not a self-designation) for those Hui people who were massively relocated from Gansu and Shaanxi provinces, primarily in 1764 during the formation of the Ili General-Governorship with the center in Kulja. The self-designation of Dungan in the USSR/CIS, which are currently used, are Huihui, Huimin "Hui people", Lo Huihui "respected Hui people" or Jun-yan zhin "people of the Central Plains".
The self-designation of the language is accordingly Hui zuo yuyan "language of the Hui nationality" or Jun-yan hua "language of the Central Plains".
Genealogy
It belongs to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Hui Muslims who resettled in Kazakhstan and Central Asia spoke several dialects of the northern Chinese language (Guānhuà trad. 官話, simp. 官话). Two main dialects were later named "Ganzu" and "Shaanxi" ("Tokmak"). They both belong to the subgroup of dialects of the Central Plain (Zhōngyuán trad. and simp. 中原), stretching from Xinjiang in the west to Shandong and the northern part of Jiangsu in the east. Within this subgroup, Dungan dialects can be defined as belonging to a small compact area covering the southeastern part of Gansu province and the western part of the Guanzhong Valley in Shaanxi province (between the cities of Xi'an and Lanzhou, not including them).
Language functioning
Ганьсуйский диалект был выбран в качестве основы для создания литературного дунганского языка в СССР.
Language experts
