What's a Language and What's a Dialect? A Chinese Example and a Whole Lot More.

In the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, there exists a population of Chinese Muslim descent who have lived there for up to 150 years.  They are called the Dungans, and they speak a language called… well, Dungan.

Yet should Dungan be considered a seperate language, or just a dialect of Chinese?  You see, a speaker of Mandarin from Beijing can understand Dungan, but would never be able to understand Cantonese or Shanghainese.  

Yet, Cantonese is considered a mere dialect of Chinese, whereas Dungan is considered a separate language.  So, why is that?  And to ask the obvious question, how did this community of Chinese descent end up in Central Asia in the first place?

Some History

It’s the year 1862, and Imperial China, ruled by the Qing Dynasty, is facing apocalyptic levels of violence.  The Taiping rebellion (1850-1864) , a civil war possibly deadlier than even World War Two, is not yet over, when an entirely separate civil war breaks out in the north western provinces of the country. 

This new rebellion (1862-1877) has been given many names, such as the Dungan Revolt, the Tonzhi Hui revolt and the Hui (Muslim) Minorities War and is widely believed to have been, in itself, the 7th deadliest war man has fought in the post-medieval era. 

While historians have differed on what to call it, what they do mostly agree on is that this war started off as a pricing dispute between two merchants but became a separatist war by Chinese Muslims based in the Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia provinces of North-Western China. 

Here in China, Muslims mainly belong to two main ethnic groups.  The most well known are the Turkic Uyghurs, who are the people of Xinjiang, (previously known as Chinese Turkestan) and are, if you like, China’s equivalent of Catalonia or the Basque Country, since they have their own language, their own historically defined territory, and their own separatist movement.

However, the other group, whom this blog article is about, are the Hui people, who are primarily descended from both Han Chinese converts to Islam, and from Silk Road Traders who arrived in China from the Muslim World.

Being largely of Han Chinese descent, the Hui people, unlike China’s other minorities, traditionally spoke Mandarin rather than any non-Sinitic language, and like the Han themselves, can be found across China rather than having their own historic Homeland.  However, due to North West China being closest to the Silk Road and the influence of Islam generally, it is there, in the provinces of Ningxia and Gansu, that the Hui are most prominent.

And it was there, in the 1860s and 70s, that the local Hui staged their rebellion and appear to have attempted to establish a separate Chinese Muslim state in the region.

Unfortunately for the rebels, they were defeated by the central government, and the reprisals were harsh – rebel leaders were executed, and their corpses were burnt, and their associates and relatives were castrated.

And that's not to mention the fact that population of Gansu and Shaanxi provinces fell by some 20 million, due to both death from the conflict itself, the subsequent famine, and due to Hui refugees fleeing the area.  

 But it’s those refugees that I want to talk about, since they were the people who upped sticks and moved across the border into then Russian controlled Central Asia, with a further group of Hui moving over in the 1880s. 

These groups thus created their own communities in what are now the ‘-Stan’ countries of Central Asia, and continued to speak their native dialects of Mandarin down the generation, but adopting the Cyrillic script and a number of loan words from Russian, Arabic, and the languages of Central Asia.  

And that is how the Dungan people and their seperate language were born, and overall, the Dungan people today number around 110,000. 

So why is Dungan considered a separate language?

Well, the separate writing system, is in my opinion, the killer factor - after all, Serbian and Croatian are almost the same language, but with the separate alphabets being what decides them apart.  

The fact that Dungan uses Cyrillic and not Chinese Characters means that whereas a Cantonese and a Mandarin speaker can communicate by writing but not by speaking, with a Dungan speaker and a Mandarin speaker, it is precisely the other way round - it seems that the inability able to communicate through writing is more important than the inability to communicate using the spoken word when deciding what is and what isn't a separate language.

But then of course there is the importance of ethnic identity.  Certainly the Dungans are registered as a separate ethnic group from modern day Chinese nationals living in the Central Asian countries however among themselves, the Dungans apparently consider themselves at one with the Hui in China, after a century and a half of separation.

Either way, Dugan is an interesting example of what’s a language and what’s a dialect.

The Dungans Today

Although the Dungans have developed their own identity outside of China, they still consider themselves people Hui people at heart and in no way have lost contact with their brothers back in China.

Under the Soviet Union, the Dungan people were much more successful at maintaining their heritage than other ethnic groups than other ethnic groups in Central Asia, with 94% of Dungans speaking Dungan as their first language in 1989.   However, this has changed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Census figures show that by 2001 that figure was around 40%. 

The Hui People in China Today

As for the Dungans’ cousins back home, the Hui people in China today are doing rather well.  As an ethnic minority, the Hui were exempt from the one child policy, and their population is now more than 10 million.

Although, as discussed, Hui people can be from anywhere in China, Ningxia, where some 20% of Hui people live, was declared an autonomous region for the Hui people in 1958.  There, the Hui form 38% of the resident population, with Han Chinese making up 62%. 

Famous Hui communities outside of Ningxia include that of Xian, with its 15^th Century Great Mosque, while in Nanjing I am very happy that I happen to live right next to a Hui restaurant, and within close walking distance of another.

The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region today, located in red. 
Ningxia  and neighboring Gansu (bordering it to the south west)
were centers of the Great Hui Revolt of the 1860s and 70s. 

Punishing Welsh-Speakers for Speaking Good English

Before I moved to Wales, back in 2014, I was once told that on no account should I, or other incomers to Wales, waste their time learning Welsh, because even if we were to meet Welsh-Speakers, it would be useless since ‘everyone can speak English.’ 

That everyone speaks English is of course true, but it was no deterrence to me I, and when Welsh Duolinguo came out about two years later, I started at it the very next day, and haven’t looked back.

My view, of course, was contrary to the one I had encountered back in 2014 – I believe that when in Rome you should do as the Romans. 

But let’s take that argument, for one moment, that which says that Welsh is useless because everyone speaks English.   Well, what it’s saying seems to be this: 

‘Thank you, Welsh-Speakers, for learning our language, English.  We are very grateful for that, and so your reward from us is that we’re not going to bother to learn a word of your language when we choose to come and live amongst you and if it makes the future of your language, culture and very identity less safe, then so be it.  If it makes you feel like you’re the foreigner in your own country, then so be it.’

Not much of a reward is it? Unfortunately though, this attitude is all too common - and what is the result of this?

Well, in many of the Welsh-Speaking communities that are still left, you have shops and restaurants where English-speaking incomer staff haven’t learnt a word of Welsh, meaning that the locals have to use their second language in order to survive in their own country, as if the locals were the foreigners, and not the incomers themselves!

In London, my local baker happened to be Romanian, but that did not mean that I had to speak Romanian if I wanted to buy something from her!

But, of course, the much bigger result of English-Speaking incomers not being assimilated by the locals in the Fro Gymraeg has been the disappearance of most of the Fro Gymraeg altogether! 

Not only has the non-assimilation of incomers led to the collapse of the Welsh Language, it has also, quite understandably, resulted in segregation, parallel communities, and social tensions. 

The 1989 A Study of Language Contact And Social Networks in Ynys Môn, by Delyth Morris, proved exactly this, which looked specifically at the village of Bryngwran, on Anglesey.  If there’s one corner of the British Isles where multiculturalism has failed, it’s with the non-assimilation of English-speaking incomers in the Fro Gymraeg. 

All this is not a reward – it’s a punishment – punishment for speaking somebody else’s language so well. 

And Welsh-speakers did not suffer this fate when they were still majority monoglot.  Indeed, when you had English-speaking incomers moving to majority Welsh monoglot communities in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, like Bethesda in 1911, the newcomers duly learned Welsh and were assimilated without any problems.

But, of course, in the 21^st century, it’s not just the Welsh who speak good English.  It’s the Germans, the Dutch, the Scandinavians, the South Koreans - you get the picture.  Now, this in itself is no bad thing, and I myself am an English teacher here in China.

But what is outrageous is that, like the Welsh, these countries are increasingly being punished for being good at English, as English-speakers who go and live in those countries feel increasingly tempted to take advantage of the locals' prowess in English and not bother learning the local language.

 

In Berlin, you now have bars staffed by English-speakers who don’t speak a word of German, something which has quite rightly caused outrage, while in Iceland, another article from the guardian, remarked that “in the bars, restaurants and shops of downtown Reykjavik, it can be a struggle for locals to get served in their native language.”

Again, this was not something that happened in these countries before the locals learned good English, and thus in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and Reykjavik, like in the Fro Gymraeg, the locals are being punished, being made to feel like foreigners on their own home turf, merely  because they are good at somebody else's language - they are being punished for being well educated.

That is something that I find plain wrong, and is why I felt compelled to learn Welsh when in Wales, and Chinese before I came to China, and why I have always felt compelled to learn the local language wherever I plan to move to.  

  

I also thus feel that there needs to be a fundamental change in attitude among English-Speakers who move abroad.  That was something I felt in 2014, and its something I feel even more now. 

Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don't, but either way, feel free to subscribe to my Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/PoliticsByRebuttal/ for more content.

The Rise of China is a Wonderful Thing

As an Englishman living in Nanjing, it was a week ago that I traveled to the Memorial To The Victims Of The Nanjing Massacre By Japanese Invaders, commemorating an event in which an estimated 300,000 of the cities inhabitants were murdered by the Japanese in December 1937, during the Sino-Japanese War. 

The Sino-Japanese War was nothing more than a war of one-sided murderous aggression by the Empire of Japan against China – Japan wanted to have more of China for itself, while China wasn't trying to invade Japan. 

During that war, and most famously during the massacre in Nanjing, Japanese forces would often murder any civilians within sight – adults, the elderly, children and babies.  They would also knock on doors, then immediately murder the person who answered the door, and then proceed with murdering their way through the whole household. 

About a week or so before I visited the memorial, I watched two survivor’s testimonies on youtube, and it was the first time in god knows how long that I needed to wipe a tissue below my eyes – the Nanjing Massacre was among the worst war crimes of the 20^th Century. 

The period of Chinese history during the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries were not a good time for the country at all – China was increasingly carved up into spheres of influence by outside aggressors, starting with the Opium Wars in which Britain, trying to turn the Chinese Nation into Opium drug addicts to fill their own pockets, used gun boat diplomacy when the Qing government objected. 

A French Political Cartoon from the height of
Imperialism, when the Japanese and European
Aggressors regarded China as a cake to share 
among themselves regardless of whether the Chin-
ese wanted this or not.                                             

During the century after that point, both the European and Japanese aggressors viewed China as a cake for themselves to feast on, a treasure chest for them to loot, and the aggressor nations viewed the Chinese as an inferior people, just as they viewed all of their captive peoples across the world.  

This is a tad ironic given that the Chinese had invented so much, and had been building grand temples, cities and palaces when we Europeans were living in the dark ages, but I digress.

A Liberal Party Election Poster from the
British General Election of 1906,  criticizing
their Tory opponents for allowing Chinese
people to move to South Africa, arguing that
SA should be for white Brits to move to instead.

Back to the Point

A century ago, China was a country that was treated as inferior and as fair game by the imperialist powers, both European and Japanese.  Likewise, the USA had banned Chinese immigration to their country – they only wanted whites.

Even though the days of Japanese and Western colonialism are long gone, for many decades afterwards, it was pretty much only the West and Japan that were the industrialized and developed nations. 

Then, they were joined by the Four Asian Tigers (including Taiwan, the Republic of China) and now by Mainland China, the People’s Republic of China. 

So when I look around me in 21^st Century China, I just feel so thrilled that a country that was in such a bad way a century ago is now excelling to such a degree, and without having to steal from other countries in the form of colonies or overseas coups.  And that is the way that we in the west should view China’s rise, regardless of our many political and ideological differences.

I also hope that other countries that fell victim to colonialist aggression will likewise follow China's lead, and end the economic divide between the formerly colonised and the former colonisers.