Salar is a Turkic language spoken by the Salar people, who mainly live in the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu in China; some also live in Ili, Xinjiang. It is a primary branch and an eastern outlier of the Oghuz branch of Turkic, the other Oghuz languages being spoken mostly in West-Central Asia. The Salar number about 105,000 people, about 70,000 speak the Salar language; under 20,000 monolinguals. According to Salar tradition and Chinese chronics, the Salars are the descendants of the Salur tribe, belonging to the Oghuz Turk tribe of the Western Turkic Khaganate. During the Tang dynasty, the Salur tribe dwelt within China's borders and lived since then in the Qinghai-Gansu border region. Contemporary Salar has some influence from Chinese and Amdo Tibetan.
Salar phonology has been influenced by Chinese and Tibetan. In addition, and have become separate phonemes due to loanwords, as it has in other Turkic languages. Salar vowels are as in Turkish, with the back vowels and the corresponding front vowels.
Classification
Although Salar is an Oghuz language, it also received influence from other non-Oghuz Turkic languages like Chagatai, Northwestern Turkic and Southeastern Turkic.
Chinese and Tibetan influence
In Qinghai Province, the Salar language has a notable influence from Chinese and Tibetan. 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 CommunistChinese 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 language has taken loans and influence from neighboring varieties of Chinese. Vice versa, the neighboring variants of the Chinese language have also adopted loan words from the Salar language. In Qinghai Province, most Salar people speak both Qinghai Mandarin and Salar. Rural Salars can speak Salar more fluently while urban Salars often assimilate more into the Chinese-speaking Hui Muslim population.
Dialects
The Qing Empire deported some Salars who belonged to the Jahriyya Sufi order to the Ili valley which is in modern-day Xinjiang. Today, a community of about four thousand Salars speaking a distinct dialect of Salar still live in Ili. Salar migrants from Amdo came to settle the region as religious exiles, migrants, and as soldiers enlisted in the Chinese army to fight rebels in Ili, often following the Hui. The distinctive dialect of the Ili Salar differs from the other Salar dialects because the neighboring Kazakh and Uyghur languages in Ili influenced it. The Ili Salar population numbers around 4,000 people. There have been instances of misunderstanding between speakers of Ili Salar and Qinghai Salar due to the divergence of the dialects. The differences between the two dialect result in a "clear isogloss".
Grammar
For the verb "to do" Salar uses "ät". The participle miš is used by Salar. In Ili Salar, the i and y high front vowels, when placed after an initial glides are spirantized with j transforming into ʝ. Qinghai and Ili Salar have mostly the same consonantal development.
Writing system
Salars mostly use Chinese for written purposes while using Salar language for spoken purposes. Salar hasn't had an official script, but it has sometimes been written down using the Arabic script. Some Salar call for a Latin script and some Salar who dislike the Latin script desire to use Chinese characters instead. This lack of an official script has led most Salar to use the Chinese writing system. China offered the Salar an official writing system quite similar to the Uyghur Yengi Yezik, but it was rejected for similar reasons as Yengi Yezik was rejected in Xinjiang. Young Salar have also started to use a Salar script based on the orthography for Turkic languages. It is quiet popular by Salars for writing Salar down on the internet. There are two main variants that are used, TB30 and TB31. Arabic script is also still popular among the Salar. The Arabic script has historical precedent among the Salar; centuries-old documents in the Salar language were written in the Arabic script when discovered. Grigory Potanin used the Cyrillic alphabet to record a glossary of Salar, Western Yugur language and Eastern Yugur language in his 1893 Russian language book The Tangut-Tibetan Borderlands of China and Central Mongolia with assistance from Vasily Radlov. William Woodville Rockhill wrote a glossary of Salar in his 1894 book Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892 using the Latin alphabet based on the Wade–Giles romanization system used for Chinese.
TB30
Aa Bb Cc Çç Dd Ee Ff Gg
Ğğ Hh İi Iı Kk Ll Mm Nn Ññ
Oo Öö Pp Qq Rr Ss Şş Tt
Uu Üü Yy Vv Zz
Pinyin-based Latin alphabet
A romanization of the Mengda dialect of Salar based on Pinyin has been developed, created by a Salar, Ma Quanlin, who lives in Xunhua. Like Pinyin, which is used to romanize Mandarin Chinese, this Salar romanization is divided into categories of consonants and vowels. Letters that occur both in Pinyin and romanization of Mengda Salar share the same sound values.
