Tibetan as a “model language” in the Amdo Sprachbund: evidence from Salar and Wutun

Abstract

Abstract This paper outlines Tibetan morphosyntactic features transferred into two genetically unrelated and typologically distinct languages, Salar (Turkic) and Wutun (Sinitic), both spoken in the same linguistic area, the Amdo Sprachbund located in the Upper Yellow River basin in Western China. Part of the research cited in this paper was carried out under the research project “Interactional, Cross-Linguistic, Theoretical and Areal Perspectives on Evidentiality and Egophoricity” funded by the Academy of Finland. Examples not otherwise cited are from the two authors’ fieldwork. We wish to thank all our Salar, Wutun and Amdo Tibetan friends for their patience and helpfulness in helping us to understand their languages. We are also grateful to the organizers and fellow participants of the International Workshop on Linguistic Microareas of South Asia held in Uppsala on May 5–6, 2014, to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Christopher Culver for improving the English language of our paper. Due to long-term linguistic contact with Amdo Tibetan, the culturally dominant language in the region, Salar and Wutun have undergone many parallel convergence processes, and they have developed shared grammatical features not found in their genetic relatives spoken elsewhere. By comparing the grammatical structures transferred from Tibetan into both Salar and Wutun, we aim to identify the most prominent Tibetan grammatical features that tend to be copied into neighboring languages despite their different genetic affiliations and typological profiles. Our study highlights the role of Tibetan as the dominant language of the Sprachbund, serving as a model for linguistic convergence for its neighboring languages.