A Grammar of Mangghuer: A Mongolic Language of China's Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund (review)

One of the least remarked aspects of the Mongol conquest is the dissemination of Mongolic languages to various corners of Eurasia. Like the far-flung remnants of a supernova, some of these are still spoken today. Keith Slater’s book is a detailed synchronic description of one such language, called Mangghuer, which has received little attention from Western linguists before the appearance of this study.

One area beyond Mongolia proper where several Mongolic languages survive is China’s Qinghai and Gansu provinces. Mangghuer is one of two language forms formerly known as Mongour, Tu, or Tuzu and represents the Minhe County variety of Mongour. The closely related though not mutually intelligible Huzhu Mongour is now known as Mongghul (cf. Stefan Georg, ‘Mongghul’, The Mongolic language family, ed. by Juha Janhunen, 286–306, New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003).

S’s book is the first full-length description of Mangghuer to be published in any language. The description is basically synchronic, but comparisons with cognates from other Mongolic languages provide a solid estimation of the position Mangghuer occupies in the family. S pays his greatest attention to the language contact situation in this area. In contrast to the author’s unpublished dissertation (Minhe Mangghuer: A mixed language of the Inner Asian frontier, Santa Barbara: University of California, 1998), S here views Mangghuer not as a true mixed language but rather as a Mongolic language that has undergone two phases of contact-induced change. The first phase involved local Bodic (Tibetan) languages and Sinitic dialects, which affected vocabulary and grammatical structure; the second phase is still in progress and involves the superstrate influence of Standard Chinese, which has greatly influenced the phonology in particular. The data S presents amply validate his conclusions about the existence of a Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund, of which both varieties of Mongour are members. The basic Mangghuer word stock remains largely Mongolic, but the phonology has come to closely resemble Standard Chinese, except in the lack of a tone system.

The book’s eight chapters describe all aspects of Mangghuer linguistic structure, including word formation and syntax. Word- and sentence-length examples are mainly derived from the author’s original fieldwork and are presented in a Latin alphabet based on China’s Pinyin. The excellent description of the phonology and orthography (53–65) far exceeds in precision anything published earlier. An appendix (334–50) contains a folkloric text given in the same alphabet, with interlinear morpheme glosses and idiomatic English translation.

The bibliography is generally excellent, with much attention paid to Chinese sources as well as those published in Western languages. Unfortunately, S seems to have made little use of the many Russian-language sources available on Mongolic. But since no significant analysis on Mangghuer has appeared in Russian, this omission is not as serious as it might have been.

Although this grammar is primarily descriptive, its well-substantiated conclusions on the areal and genetic connections between Mangghuer and neighboring languages makes it likewise valuable to any linguist interested in working out the complex picture of language contact in this area of the world.