Overview of the Sociolinguistic Context of the Dongxiang Language

In 2009, when I first visited the Dongxiang Autonomous County to conduct fieldwork, I was struck by how ‘backward’ the whole area was in terms of economics and infrastructure development as compared to the rest of China. The eastern part of the country, in particular – where I had already spent a few years – had started to blossom 10 years before. Dongxiang had poor road connections, even to the district ‘capital’ Suonanba (锁南坝), and some villages were not even accessible by car. Although electricity was widely available, some villages were still not connected to the main water supply and had to rely on wells. At the time, the level of poverty was the highest in China, as was the level of illiteracy in Chinese. During my fieldwork, I met almost 200 people. Among these, most women from my generation could only read one or two characters, while men who had received more than 3 years of education at primary school were rare. Most professional activities focused on agriculture, and cultural life centred around the mosques and religious life. In the main town of Suonanba, trade was limited to the weekly market for food and basic necessities, along with the cattle and the coal markets. There was a main street with about 50 shops, including a ‘modern accommodation’ (and a small supermarket attached to it), which was the Mínzú dàshà (民族大厦), the County’s ‘minority hotel’, where officials from outside stayed when visiting. The other commercial areas were in Narisi (娜日斯) and Daban (达板), two other towns (zhèn 镇) in the county. And there was not much else in Dongxiang – only small stores were to be found in some villages. Outside the towns, most household’s staple food such as dairy products and bread were produced at home on a daily basis, not only because it was an economical way to access them, but also because there was no place to buy them. Although parts of the county were partially connected to the surrounding regions and more developed than others, Dongxiang was isolated and left behind the ‘high-speed economic train’ that the rest of China was on. It was almost as if time had stopped in the late 1980s, when the Chinese government had last initiated the construction of the few buildings that could still be seen in the various local administrative towns (zhèn 镇) scattered across the region. Another remarkable phenomenon was the scarcity of men present in the countryside villages. As opposed to the rest of China, where both parents worked as migrant labourers in the cities and children were left in the care of their grandparents in the countryside, the women of Dongxiang remained with their elders and children, and were responsible for farming activities while the men worked in the cities. Because of this specific context, and although bilingualism with the Chinese variety of Linxia was already widespread at the time, the Dongxiang language was not endangered. The developmental backwardness of the whole area – in terms of education, economic development, and communication – as well as the fact that Dongxiang was vividly spoken in rural areas and transmitted to children through women were the reasons why, at the time, no one believed that the Dongxiang language would disappear in the near future. Neither could the drastic sociological and socio-economical changes that were to take place over the next 15 years be foreseen.

This book is based on data collected in this specific environment in 2009 and 2010 for my PhD thesis, which I defended in 2012. It was later updated using existing literature and additional data available up until 2016. One might wonder: why is it important to publish this study 15 years after the data were collected?