Fuyu Kyrgyz (''Fuyü Gïrgïs, Fu-Yu Kirgiz''), also known as Manchurian Kirghiz, is a critically endangered
Turkic language
The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic langua ...
, and as , ''Gïrgïs'', ''Kyrgysdar'' is an ethnonym of the
Turkic unrecognized ethnic group in China. Despite the name, the Fuyu Kyrgyz language is not closely related to the
Kyrgyz language
Kyrgyz is a Turkic language of the Kipchak branch spoken in Central Asia. Kyrgyz is the official language of Kyrgyzstan and a significant minority language in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in Xinjiang, China and in the Gorno-Badak ...
, which is of
Kipchak origin. The Fuyu Kyrgyz language is more similar to the
Western Yugur language and the Abakan Turkic languages. The Fuyu Kyrgyz were relocated from the present day
Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture
Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture is an autonomous prefecture in western Xinjiang, China, bordering Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Its Capital (political), capital is Artush. The prefecture is home to 622,222 people () and covers an area of . Mo ...
by the Qing government nearly 200 years ago.
In 1761, after the Dzungars were defeated by the Qing, a group of
Yenisei Kirghiz were deported (along with some Öelet or
Oirat-speaking Dzungars) to the
Nonni (Nen) river basin in
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical region in northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day northeast China and parts of the modern-day Russian Far East south of the Uda (Khabarovsk Krai), Uda River and the Tukuringra-Dzhagdy Ranges. The exact ...
/
Northeast China
Northeast China () is a geographical region of China, consisting officially of three provinces Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang. The heartland of the region is the Northeast China Plain, the largest plain in China with an area of over . The regi ...
. The Kyrgyz in Manchuria became known as the Fuyu Kyrgyz, but many have become merged into the Mongol and Chinese population. Chinese and Oirat replaced Oirat and Kirghiz during the period of
Manchukuo
Manchukuo, officially known as the State of Manchuria prior to 1934 and the Empire of Great Manchuria thereafter, was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Northeast China that existed from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945. It was ostens ...
as the dual languages of the Nonni-based Kyrgyz.
The Fuyu Kyrgyz language is now spoken in northeastern China's
Heilongjiang
Heilongjiang is a province in northeast China. It is the northernmost and easternmost province of the country and contains China's northernmost point (in Mohe City along the Amur) and easternmost point (at the confluence of the Amur and Us ...
province, in and around
Fuyu County,
Qiqihar (300 km northwest of
Harbin
Harbin, ; zh, , s=哈尔滨, t=哈爾濱, p=Hā'ěrbīn; IPA: . is the capital of Heilongjiang, China. It is the largest city of Heilongjiang, as well as being the city with the second-largest urban area, urban population (after Shenyang, Lia ...
) by a small number of
passive speakers who are classified as
Kyrgyz nationality. Fuyu County as a whole has 1,400 Fuyu Kyrgyz people.
Speakers
In 1980, Fuyu Girgis was spoken by a majority of adults in a community of around a hundred homes. However, many adults in the area have switched to speaking a local variety of
Mongolian, and children have switched to
Chinese as taught in the education system.
Phonology
Although a complete
phonemic
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
analysis of Girgis has not been done, Hu and Imart have made numerous observations about the sound system in their tentative description of the language. They describe Girgis as having the short
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s noted as "a, ï, i, o, ö, u, ü" which correspond roughly to
IPA , with minimal rounding and tendency towards centralization. Vowel length is phonemic and occurs as a result of consonant-deletion (Girgis vs. Kyrgyz 'today'). Each short vowel has an equivalent long vowel, with the addition of . Girgis displays
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...
as well as
consonant harmony. The
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...
sounds in Girgis, including
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...
variants, are . Girgis does not display a phonemic difference between the stop set and ; these stops can also be aspirated to in Chinese loanwords.
Sample text
A song in the Fuyu Kyrgyz language:
See also
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Kyrgyz in China
References
Works cited
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{{Turkic languages
Agglutinative languages
Siberian Turkic languages
Languages of Heilongjiang
Endangered Turkic languages
Endangered languages of China
Critically endangered languages