Formation of a “Mixed Language” in Northwest China—the Case of Tangwang

Abstract

Gansu Province, located in Northwest China, is a region with linguistic, cultural and genetic mixture of various ethnic groups speaking Sinitic and non-Sinitic languages. Within the historical context of East-West exchanges, present-day populations in this area show a high level of both linguistic and genetic diversity, indicating that their languages and genetic makeup may be associated with complex processes of linguistic contact and population admixture. Our article deals with the Tangwang language and the formation of the Tangwang people. According to our preliminary research, a solely linguistic approach is insufficient; an interdisciplinary approach is required. We try to combine a linguistic approach with a biological one, to better understand the co-evolution of language and genes. The Tangwang language has been investigated thoroughly in our previous linguistic studies, and the origins of the Tangwang people have relatively clear historical records; thus the Tangwang people and their language are an ideal model for studying language contact and formation of a new population. In this study, we first collected 151 male samples from 5 family clans (with surnames Zhao, Yang, Zhang, Tang, and Wang) in the town of Tangwang in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province, to trace the origin and demographic history of the Tangwang people, and then investigated 96 linguistic features of the Tangwang language andother reference languages in China. Our results show that: 1) Almost all the clans have dominant paternal lineages associated with different origins; 2) the times to most recent common ancestor of the 5 clans coincide with the records of local settlement history; 3) based on 94 linguistic features, the Tangwang language tends to cluster with Sinitic languages rather than with non-Sinitic languages. Overall, we can employ the principle of language, Y chromosome and clan co-evolution to reconstruct the formation of a mixed population and their languages, and to further study the relationships between language contact and population admixture.