Inner Asia Langauge Research: An Overview

Dwyer (1992, 1995) first proposed applying the term Sprachbund to the area, which was adopted by Slater (2003) and Janhunen (2004), the latter discussing convergence features. Indivi­dual grammars of some of these endangered varieties have appeared (e.g. de Smedt and Mostaert 1945, Todae­va 1960, Tenishev 1976, Field 1997, Roos 2000, Slater 2003, Dwyer 2007), as well as sketch grammars of hard-to-classify “mixed” varieties (Sechenchogt 1999, 2002, Janhunen et al 2008) and a lexical study of Monguor and Tibetan (Róna Tas 1966).

Examples of convergence include Turco-Mongolic morpholo­gy and syntax in NW Mandarin (Dwyer 1992, 1995, Zhu et al 1989), tonogenesis in Mongolic (Dwyer 2008), and Sino-Tibetan retroflex obstruents and Tibetan evidentiality in Salar (Dwyer 2007) and SE Monguor (Slater 2003). Despite the seemingly large speaker numbers for two of the five focus languages, language attrition is proceeding rapidly, due to a lack of schooling and media in the languages and low prestige.

Inner Asian website: languages (focus languages are shaded). Speaker numbers from Lewis 2009; NW Mandarin numbers extrapolated from the 2000 China census.

Family	Language [ISO]	Speakers	Existing Documentation
Sino-Tibetan	NW Mandarin [cmn]	43,500,000	sketches (Zhang/Zhu ’87, Zhu et al 1989, Dede 2007)
	Amdo Tibetan [adx]	810,000	lexicon (Hua/Long 1993), sketches (Roerich 1958, Mackeley et al. 1999); phonology (Sun 1986, 1993)
Mongolic	Monguor [mjg]	120,000	extensive, but SE less so: mainly Slater ’03, Dwyer ‘08
	Baonan [peh]	8,000	grammars (Todaeva 1960, Chen & Chinggeltai 1986)
Turkic	Salar [slr]	20,000	extensive, e.g. Tenishev 1976, Lin 1992, Dwyer 2007
creoles/ mixed	Wutun [wuh]	2000	sketch (Janhunen et al 2008)
	Kangjia [kxs]	430	sketch (Sechenchogt 1999, 2002)

 

Even thorough sur­veys of the world’s major linguistic areas (e.g. Muysken 2008) omit Inner Asia, due to the information void. The field currently has no reliable electronic resources on any aspect of Inner Asian languages, let alone ones that are comparative and historical. Cross-linguistically, etymo­lo­gical dic­tionaries are rare, es­­­pe­ci­ally of endangered languages. At most, such languages are very spo­ra­dically re­presented in com­parative etymological surveys (e.g. a few Salar and Monguor examples ap­pear in Sta­rostin et al. 2003). For Salar, Monguor, Wutun and Baonan, there is no precedent for a single-lan­guage or comparative etymological dictionary. In Turkic, there is only one (excellent) print dictionary for pre-13th century Turkic (Clauson 1972) and one for Turkish (Nişanyan 2007), but for Mongolic ”[n]o etymological dictionary of the Mongolic language family has ever been prepared” (Janhunen 2003: xix), and this is still true today.

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