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Mangghuer Literature

Mangghuer, or Minhe Mangghuer, is spoken by about 25,000 people in Minhe Hui and Mangghuer (Tu) Autonomous County, Haidong Region, Qinghai Province, PR China, just north of the Yellow River that divides Qinghai and Gansu provinces. Mangghuer has only recently been described as a language in its own right. Rather, it was treated as one of the two main dialects of the ethnic “language” spoken by the official “Monguor” (Tu) nationalitiy, the other dialect being Huzhu Mongghul, spoken mainly in Huzhu Tu Autonomous County, also in Qinghai. (See Keith W. Slater. 2003. “Mangghuer” in Juha Janhunen, editor, The Mongolic Languages. Routledge: New York. pp. 307-324).

The first reader of the Mangghuer language has recently become available:

Wang Xianzhen, writer; Zhu Yongzhong and Kevin Stuart, editors. 2001. Mangghuerla Bihuang Keli [Mangghuer Folktale Reader]. Chengdu, China-Chengdu Audio Press.

Published through the generosity of The Bridge Fund, the 23 folktales in Mangghuer Folktale Reader are written in the Mangghuer language that broadly follows Chinese pinyin. This system is easily understood by primary and middle school students. This book's selections were collected by Wang Xianzhen and Zhu Yongzhong in 1996 from Mangghuer villages in Minhe County using a sound recorder. They were later transcribed into Mangghuer and then edited. This is the first book ever written in Mangghuer. It was distributed to Mangghuer students. The Preface is written in Minhe Mangghuer and translated into Huzhu Mongghul (Limusishiden), English, Chinese, Tibetan, Spanish (Manuel Lopez), Finnish (Juha Janhunen), Malay (Gillian Tan), Romanian (Alexandru Anton-Luca), German (Hildegard Diemberger), French (Lorraine de Beaufort), and Swedish (Kristoffer Lindqvist).