A Study Of Chinese Loanwords In Tuvalanguage In China

Tuvan is a language spoken in China by Tuvinians living in the Atlay region in Xinjiang.Due to the fact that only two thousand people are using this language and the lack of letter symbols to record it,Tuvan and the Tuva culture are not well protected,part of which have disappeared.In light of that,the study and protection of Tuvan and its culture is of extreme urgency and necessity.Living in China's multiethnic family,it is undoubted that the language used by Tuvinians is affected more or less by other languages.As the ecological tourism around Tuvan villages becomes increasingly popular,it is hard for Tuvan to resist the ever-lasting influence from Chinese.This paper is a monographic study on the words borrowed by this Turkic language from Chinese.During a field investigation,the Hemu village and the Kanas village inhabited by Tuvinians were interviewed,by standing on the shoulder of previous research,to investigate the use and borrowing of Chinese words in Tuvan.Compared with loanwords from other languages,there are a very limited number of Chinese loanwords in Tuvan and available relevant data.Overcoming the above unfavorable factors and relying on two provincial and ministerial projects,the author with a research group visited and conducted a wide survey on Tuvan settlements in person,during which,the author gained a lot of firsthand materials and met an acknowledged Tuvan linguist.In addition to references of previous research,the various analyses of Chinese loanwords in Tuvan explained in this paper would not have been possible without these firsthand materials and the help from Tuvan linguists.Through the study on Chinese loanwords in Tuvan,this paper further illustrates the communication between Tuvan and Chines as well as the degree of influence from Chinese.This paper can accumulate certain reference for related Tuvan research and provide some corpus for the preservation of endangered languages.