Fuyü Gïrgïs dialect
Fuyü Gïrgïs or Fu-Yu Kirgiz, also known as Manchurian Kirghiz, is the easternmost Turkic language. It is spoken in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, in and around Fuyu County, Qiqihar, which is located approximately 300 km northwest of Harbin. Fuyü Gïrgïs is spoken by a small number of passive speakers, who are classified as Kyrgyz nationality. However, it is not a dialect of Kyrgyz, but of Khakas; the people migrated from Russia in 1761, and the name may be due to the survival of a common tribal name. Girgis is probably a member of the Siberian Turkic languages and related to the Khakas language.[1]
Sounds
Although completely phonemic analysis of Girgis has not been done,[2] Hu and Imart have noted numerous observations about the sound system in their tentative description of the language. They describe Girgis as having the short vowels noted as "a, ï, i, o, ö, u, ü" which correspond roughly to IPA [a, ə, ɪ, ɔ, œ, ʊ, ʉ], with minimal rounding and tendency towards centralization.[3] Vowel length is phonemic and occur as a result of consonant-deletion (Girgis /pʉːn/ vs. Kyrgyz /bygyn/). Each short vowel has an equivalent long vowel, with the addition of /eː/. Girgis does clearly display vowel harmony as well as consonant harmony.[4] The consonant sounds in Girgis, including allophone variants, are [p, b, ɸ, β, t, d, ð, k, q, ɡ, h, ʁ, ɣ, s, ʃ, z, ʒ, dʒ, tʃ, m, n, ŋ, l, r, y]. Girgis does not display a phonemic difference between the stop set /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/; these stops can also be aspirated to [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] in Chinese loanwords.[5]
Speakers
In 1980, Fuyu Girgis was spoken by a majority adults of 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.[6]
Notes
References
- Hu, Zhen-hua; Imart, Guy (1987), Fu-Yü Gïrgïs: A tentative description of the easternmost Turkic language, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies
- Li, Yongsŏng; Ölmez, Mehmet; Kim, Juwon (2007), "Some Newly Identified Words in Fuyu Kirghiz (Part 1)", Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher (Neue Folge) 21: 141–169