Salar is a Turkic language spoken by the Salar people, who mainly live in the provinces of Qinghai

Qinghai

Qinghai ; Oirat Mongolian: ; ; Salar:) is a province of the People's Republic of China, named after Qinghai Lake...

 and Gansu

Gansu

' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.It lies between the Tibetan and Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east...

 in China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

; some also live in Ghulja, Xinjiang

Xinjiang

Xinjiang is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China. It is the largest Chinese administrative division and spans over 1.6 million km2...

. The Salar number about 105,000 people, of whom about 60,000 speak the Salar language; the remaining 45,000 speak Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

.

The Salar arrived at their current location in the 14th century, having migrated there from the west, according to a Salar legend from Samarkand

Samarkand

Although a Persian-speaking region, it was not united politically with Iran most of the times between the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and the Arab conquest . In the 6th century it was within the domain of the Turkic kingdom of the Göktürks.At the start of the 8th century Samarkand came...

. Linguistic evidence points to a possible western Turkic, Oghuz

Oghuz Turks

The Turkomen also known as Oghuz Turks were a historical Turkic tribal confederation in Central Asia during the early medieval Turkic expansion....

 origin of the Salar. Contemporary Salar is heavily influenced by contact with Tibetan

Tibetan language

The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...

 and Chinese.

Status

The Salar language is the official language in all Salar autonomous areas. Such autonomous areas are the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County

Xunhua Salar Autonomous County

Xunhua Salar Autonomous County is an autonomous Salar county in the southeast of Haidong Prefecture of Qinghai province, People's Republic of China. The county has an area of around and approximately 110,000 inhabitants...

 and the Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County

Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County

Jishishan Bonan, Dongxiang and Salar Autonomous County is a Autonomous County in the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, province of Gansu of the People's Republic of China....

.

Phonology

Salar phonology has been influenced by Tibetan and Chinese. In addition, /k, q/ and /g, ɢ/ have become separate phonemes due to loanwords, as it has in other Turkic languages.

Consonants

	Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...		Dental		Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology...		Alveolopalatal Alveolo-palatal consonant In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate...		Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....		Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...		Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Plosive	p	b	t	d					k	ɡ	q	ɢ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...					t͡ʂ	d͡ʐ	t͡ɕ	d͡ʑ
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	f	v	s	z	ʂ		ɕ		x		ʁ		h
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	m		n
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...			l r				j

Salar vowels are as in Turkish

Turkish phonology

The phonology of the Turkish language describes the set of sounds and their relationships with one another in spoken Turkish. One characteristic feature of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that distinguishes between front and back vowels. The majority of words in Turkish adhere to a system of...

, with the back vowels a, ɨ, o u and the corresponding front vowels e, i, ø, y.

Chinese and Tibetan Influence

In Amdo, Salar language has heavy Chinese and Tibetan influence. Although of Turkic origin, major linguistic structures have been absorbed from Chinese. Around 20% of the vocabulary is of Chinese origin, and 10% is also of Tibetan origin. Yet the official Communist Chinese government policy deliberately covers up these influences in academic and linguistics studies, trying to emphasize the Turkic element and completely ignoring the Chinese in the Salar language. The Salar use the Chinese writing system

Chinese character

Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

 since they do not have their own. Salar language has taken loans and influence from neighboring Chinese languages. It is neighboring variants of Chinese which have loaned words to the Salar language.

Writing system

Salar used to be written in Arabic script, they still use it at present. There are calls to standardize the Arabic based script for Salar. However, the Chinese government has refused to do so, rejecting both calls by some Salar for a Latin script, and calls by Salar elders who disliked the Latin script to help standardize the Arabic script, leaving the Salar language without an official script.

Despite there being an unofficial Latin-script alphabet based on the orthography for Turkic languages for the Salar, the Latin script is unpopular among the Salar and has failed to catch on. Arabic script is much more popular among Salar. The government desires there to be no script available for them at all. The Arabic script has historical precedent among the Salar, centuries old documents in the Salar language were written in the Arabic script when discovered.

The Salar do have a script for their language. This lack of an official script has led the Salar to use Chinese writing.

Sources

• Hahn, R. F. 1988. Notes on the Origin and Development of the Salar Language, Acta Orientalia Hungarica XLII (2–3), 235–237.
• Dwyer, A. 1996. Salar Phonology. Unpublished dissertation University of Washington.
• Dwyer, A. M. 1998. The Turkic strata of Salar: An Oghuz in Chaghatay clothes? Turkic Languages 2, 49–83.

External links

• Abstract of Article on Salar, includes some phrases (The Salar is written in Chinese Pinyin, not the Salar alphabet)
• REMARKS ON THE SALAR LANGUAGE
• Salar grammatical sketch
• Salar Language Materials