Westem Yugur, or Yellow Uygur, is one of the smaller Turkic languages,
spoken by some 4,500 people living primarily in Stni{n Yugur Autonomous
County, in Gdnsil Province in the People's Republic of China. The Westem
Yugur people are part of the Yugur nationality, one of China's 56 officially
recognized nationalities, consisting of 10,569 persons according to the 1982
census.
Within the Yugur nationality, four different languages are spoken: Westem
Yugur, a Turkic language, Eastem Yugur, a Mongolic language, Tibetan,
and Chinese. Chinese is the language of conbact between the different
linguistic groups, and functions as written medium. Westem Yugur is a
non-written language.
Westem Yugur can be classified as belonging to the North Eastem subgroup
of Turkic languages on the basis of the development of CT *-d- and
*-igli'g (featuring azaqh 'foot'andsari'y 'yellow').Itis most closely related
to Khakas, Tuva, Tofalar, and Yakut. Apparently for geographical reasons,
Westem Yugur has sometimes been considered a dialect of Modem Uygur,
together with Salar. Salar and Modern Uygur, however, both belong to the
*ayak branch of Turkic languages, Salar to the Oghuz subgroup and Modern
Uygur to the Chaghatay subgroup.
The first to report on the language of the Western Yugur were the explorers
Potanin (1893) and Mannerheim (1911). The first linguist to visit the
Yugur was Malov; during his expeditions in 1909-1911 and 1913-1915, he
collected materials on Westem Yugur, a part of which was published in
several articles before the publication of his vocabulary and grammatical outline
(1957) and a collection of texts (1967). A short survey of the Westem
Yugur language was compiled by Thomsen (1959). In the late 1950s several
Sino-Russian research expeditions were organized in Gdnst and Qinghli
provinces; the language materials collected were published in subsequent
years. Teni5ev and Todaeva jointly published a short survey of both
Western and Eastem Yugur (1966). A more detailed monograph on Westem
Yugur, consisting of a grammar, vocabulary and texts was published by Teni5ev (1976).In the 1980s Chinese linguists srarred ro publish on Westem
Yugur, Ch6n and I.6i jointly published a grafirmar with vocabulary
(1985), and Ch6n wrote several articles on this language (1982, 1986, 1987,
1992, 1993). A Westem Yugur-Chinese dictionary was published by l.6i
(r99D.