mDungnag Tibetan (or ''mDung-nag''; also known as Dongna 东纳话
) is a divergent
Tibetic language of western
Gansu
Gansu is a provinces of China, province in Northwestern China. Its capital and largest city is Lanzhou, in the southeastern part of the province. The seventh-largest administrative district by area at , Gansu lies between the Tibetan Plateau, Ti ...
, China.
Distribution
mDungnag is spoken in Qifeng Tibetan Ethnic Township (祁丰藏族乡),
Sunan Yugur Autonomous County
Sunan Yugur Autonomous County ( zh, s=肃南裕固族自治县) is an autonomous county under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Zhangye, Gansu Province, China, bordering Qinghai province to the south. It is home to the majority o ...
, Gansu, China.
[Shao, Mingyuan 邵明园 (2018). ''Hexi Zoulang binwei Zangyu Dongnahua yanjiu'' 河西走廊濒危藏语东纳话研究 tudy on the mDungnag dialect, an endangered Tibetan language in Hexi Corridor Guangzhou: Zhongshan University Publishing House 中山大学出版社.]
Classification
Shao (2018) notes that mDungnag is not mutually intelligible with either
Khams Tibetan
Khams Tibetan () is the Tibetic languages, Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages (the other two being Amdo Tibetan and Ü-Tsang). In ...
or
Amdo Tibetan
Amdo Tibetan (; also called ''Am kä'') is the Tibetic language spoken in Amdo (now mostly in Qinghai, some in Ngawa and Gannan). It has two varieties, the farmer dialects and the nomad dialects.
Amdo is one of the three branches of tradition ...
. It may possibly be a divergent form of Amdo Tibetan due to some shared vocabulary, although these similarities could also be due to contact. The exact classification of mDungnag within Tibetic remains uncertain.
Phonology
mDungnag is a non-tonal language.
Dialects
mDungnag can be divided into two dialects:
*Hexi 河西 ("West River"): spoken in Baozitan Village 堡子滩村
*Hedong 河东 ("East River"): spoken in Qingkedi Village 青稞地村 and Ciyaokou 瓷窑口村 Village. This is the dialect that is primarily documented in Shao (2018).
Some lexical differences between the Hexi and Hedong dialects include the following. Translated English glosses have also been provided to supplement the original Chinese glosses from Shao (2018).
References
{{Lowercase title
Bodic languages
Languages of Gansu