Giulia Cabras

Wutun (called ngandehua ‘our language’ by its speakers) is considered either a mixed language or an aberrant variety of Northwestern Mandarin strongly influenced by Amdo Tibetan. It is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in Wutun/Sengge gshong village in Rengong/Tongren county, Qinghai Province.
This talk will introduce the language community and its sociolinguistic situation. It will then present several morphosyntactic characteristics of Wutun, highlighting both features it shares with varieties of Northwestern Mandarin and ways in which it differs from Standard Mandarin.
Finally, I will present results from a study on the lexicon, exploring prospects for lexical borrowing in an intense language contact situation, as well as the impact of the environment, cultural influences, and linguistic prestige in the development of the lexicon of a small language community.