Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund

The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund or Amdo sprachbund is a sprachbund in the plateau traversed by the upper Yellow River, including northeastern Qinghai and southern Gansu. This has long been an area of interaction between speakers of northwestern varieties of Mandarin Chinese, Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages.[1] These families feature contrasting typologies, which spread between languages in the region.[2] The languages have come to share many features, and differ significantly from their relatives outside the region.[3]

Languages
Area of the sprachbund, with shading indicating official minority designation of counties or prefectures:

The languages involved include[4]

More mainstream varieties of northwestern Mandarin are spoken in the provincial capitals, Xining and Lanzhou.[9] All these languages are subject to a superstrate influence from Standard Mandarin.[14]

These languages belong to families with three sharply contrasting typologies:

ChineseTibeticMongolic and Turkic
Sentence structure[2] SVO SOV SOV
Noun phrases[15] Adj+N N+Adj Adj+N
Morphology[2] isolating suffixal suffixal
Alignment[15] accusative ergative accusative
Phonemic tone yes no[lower-alpha 1] no

The Mandarin varieties have acquired such features as spirantized voiceless stops, SOV word order and case markers.[16] The Wutun language of Tongren county, Qinghai, is a highly divergent Mandarin variety, with phonological and grammatical structures resembling Amdo Tibetan.[17]

In some cases, the changes progress through the speaker population in a few decades, so that they can be observed in progress. A common pattern is to add a borrowed structure beside an indigenous structure with the same function, after which the indigenous structure loses its function and eventually disappears, leaving a changed syntactic pattern. For example, the indigenous Bonan comparative structure was N-si, where the noun N represents the standard being compared against. Bonan added the equivalent Mandarin structure, bi+N, yielding a composite bi+N-si. The original suffix was then lost, leaving a transformed syntactic pattern.[2]

Notes
  1. Some Tibetic languages, including Lhasa Tibetan have developed tonal registers, but these are absent from Amdo Tibetan.[15]

References

Citations
  1. Dwyer (1992), p. 161.
  2. Li (1983), p. 50.
  3. Janhunen (2007), p. 85.
  4. Janhunen (2012), p. 178.
  5. Xu (2014), p. 60.
  6. Dwyer (1995), p. 145.
  7. Wurm (1995), pp. 59–60.
  8. Janhunen et al. (2008), p. 11.
  9. Janhunen (2007), p. 86.
  10. Slater (2003), pp. 2–3.
  11. Slater (2003), pp. 5–6.
  12. Janhunen (2007), p. 87.
  13. Slater (2003), p. 11.
  14. Dwyer (1995), p. 149.
  15. Xu (2014), p. 62.
  16. Dwyer (1992), p. 144.
  17. Janhunen et al. (2008), p. 7.

Works cited
  • Dwyer, Arienne M. (1992), "Altaic Elements in the Línxìa dialect: Contact-induced change on the Yellow River plateau", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 20 (1): 160–178, JSTOR 23756719.
  • ——— (1995), "From the Northwest China Sprachbund: Xúnhuà Chinese dialect data", Yuen Ren Society Treasury of Chinese Dialect Data, hdl:1808/7090.
  • Janhunen, Juha (2007), "Typological interaction in the Qinghai linguistic complex", Studia Orientalia, 101: 85–102.
  • ——— (2012), "On the hierarchy of structural convergence in the Amdo Sprachbund", in Suihkonen, Pirkko; Comrie, Bernard; Solovyev, Valery (eds.), Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations: A Crosslinguistic Typology, John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 177–189, ISBN 978-90-272-0593-3.
  • Janhunen, Juha; Peltomaa, Marja; Sandman, Erika; Xiawu, Dongzhou (2008), Wutun, Munich: Lincom Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-026-3.
  • Li, Charles N. (1983), "Languages in contact in western China", Papers in East Asian Languages, 1: 31–51.
  • Slater, Keith W. (2003), A grammar of Mangghuer: A Mongolic language of China's Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund, Routledge, ISBN 0-7007-1471-5.
  • Wurm, S. A. (1995), "The Silk Road and Hybridized Languages in North-Western China", Diogenes, 43 (3): 53–62, doi:10.1177/039219219504317107.
  • Xu, Dan (2014), "The role of geography in the northwest China linguistic area", in Xu, Dan; Fu, Jingqi (eds.), Space and Quantification in Languages of China, Springer, pp. 57–73, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10040-1_4, ISBN 978-3-319-10040-1.

Further reading
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