A grammatical overview of Santa Mongolian

The Santa (or Dongxiang) nationality is one of the fifty-five officially recognized national minorities of the People's Republic of China. Numbering over 370,000 according to the 1992 census (Grimes 1992), the Santa live in southern Gansu Province in the arid and mountainous Dongxiang Autonomous County which is situated to the south of Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province.; Santa is a Mongolic language. It has SOV word order with strictly suffixing, agglutinative morphology. Santa is mutually unintelligible with any other members of the Mongolic language family, including Baonan (or Bao'an), Monguor (or Tuzu), and Eastern Yugur (not to be confused with Uighur spoken in Xinjiang province in northwestern China), which are all spoken in the Gansu-Qinghai border region. These four languages are considered to be orphans of the Mongolic language family because there are no direct historical links tying them with Mongolic proper, and because of their geographic isolation from the rest of Mongolic proper as well. However, comparative methodology reveals that these languages are indeed of Mongolic origin.; My hypothesis is that Santa Mongolian has undergone at least two significant stages of contact-induced language change. The first stage, an example of language shift, which dates back to the emergence of the Santa language during the Yuan dynasty in the 13th or 14th century, is characterized by the presumed shift of a significant number of Turkic and also possibly Persian speaking people to Mongolic. The interference from this Turkic substratum is apparently responsible for the ultimate stress pattern found in modern Santa Mongolian as well as a number of other Turkic-like features.; The second stage, an example of language maintenance, is more recent, dating back perhaps only two or three hundred years and continuing to the present. It is characterized by intense contact with the Chinese Hui of Linxia in Gansu Province, Muslims who speak a northwestern Mandarin dialect. As a result of this contact, Santa has incorporated numerous Hui borrowings in the phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic domains.; This dissertation is a grammatical overview of Santa Mongolian. My hope is that this work will not only serve as a general reference for both linguists and non-linguists alike but that it will be a valuable contribution in the study of contact-induced language change as well.