Influences of Chinese on the Phonology and Lexicon of Salar and Western Yugur from the Perspective of Language Contact

As a multi-ethnic contact zone on the Northwest Ethnic Corridor, the Gansu-Qinghai area has witnessed long-term ethnic coexistence and frequent language contact. The Salar and Western Yugur peoples differ in ethnic origin and have settled in this region for only several hundred years. Salar and Western Yugur are Turkic languages endemic to Gansu and Qinghai provinces in China. Prolonged language contact has led both languages to absorb a large number of Chinese loanwords, bringing about systematic changes in their linguistic structures. Taking the shared Chinese loanwords in the two languages as a starting point, this paper adopts descriptive and comparative approaches to examine the common influences of Chinese on Salar and Western Yugur, focusing on their phonological and lexical changes.