新疆察哈爾話簡介

Abstract

According to the latest vital statistics, some 20,000 Chakhar Mongols today live in the Borotala Autonomous Prefecture and some other counties (cities) in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. They are the descendants of the Chakhar Mongols migrated from Inner Mongolia to Jungaria in 1762-1764. For the reason that the Mongol speech spoken by them has not yet researched in detail, this paper aims at providing some basic information on the dialect giving some examples collected from relevant areas. At the same time, the author concludes that the Xinjiang Chakhar dialect is one of the Oirat dialects and can be classified into two subdialects named as Borotala subdialect (博樂次土語) and Arshaan subdialect (溫泉次土語). Of the two subdialects, the former is closer to other Oirat dialects such as Torghut and Ölet while the latter shares some common grounds with the Inner Mongolian dialect. As for main differences between the two subdialects, the Arshaan subdialect has the consonants /k/ /ts/ /dz/ while the corresponding consonants in the Borotala subdialect are /x/ /ʧ/ /ʤ/, respectively. Some other differences are also shown by their vowel harmony rules, vocabularies, etc. The author specially points out that some developments of Mongolian can be observed from the comparison between the Xinjiang Chakhar dialect and the Inner Mongolian Chakhar dialect.