Dungan language facts for kids

The Dungan language is the main language spoken by the Dungan people. These people are an ethnic group who live in parts of the former Soviet Union and Xinjiang, China. The Dungan people are descendants of the Hui people. They call their own language the Hui language.

Dungan is a language that grew out of Mandarin Chinese. It is based on the ways people speak in the Gansu and Shaanxi areas of China. People who speak Dungan and those who speak these Chinese dialects can mostly understand each other. This is called mutual intelligibility.

Like Chinese, Dungan is a tonal language. This means the meaning of a word can change depending on the pitch of your voice. It is also an analytic language. This means words don't change much to show things like tense or number. Instead, separate words are used.

However, there are some key differences between Dungan and Chinese. Dungan is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, which is also used for Russian. Chinese, on the other hand, uses Chinese characters. Dungan also has many words borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Some words used in Dungan are no longer common in Standard Chinese.

Images for kids

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  Books in Dungan or about Dungan (in Russian or English). Most of them were published in Frunze, Kirghiz SSR

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  Bilingual sign in Dungan and Russian respectively, at the home of Soviet war hero Mansuzy Vanakhun

See also

In Spanish: Idioma dungano para niños