Wiktionary:About Wutunhua

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Wutunhua is an isolated variety of Mandarin Chinese which has been heavily influenced by Amdo Tibetan, and to a lesser extent by the Mongolic language Bonan. It is not intelligible with other Mandarin dialects, and is spoken by around four thousand people in three villages in Tongren, Qinghai, China. Virtually all speakers are bilingual in the local variety of Amdo, and the community considers itself (and has recently been reclassified by the government as) ethnically Tibetan, their mother tongue notwithstanding. The villagers are Tibetan Buddhists and are famous for their thangka paintings.

Wutunhua speakers do not normally write their language. When pressed to do so, they will write in the Tibetan script or with variations of pinyin, but there is no standardized orthography.

In academia, Wutunhua is transcribed using an adaptation of pinyin. While all retain the pinyin basis, different transcription methods exist due to differing analyses of the language's phonology. Below are given transcription schemes by Janhunen et al. 2008, Sandman 2016 (largely based on Janhunen), and the rather ad hoc system of the University of Kansas's Interactive Inner Asia program.

In Wiktionary, the Sandman transcription is used.

The main distinction in the initials is the degree to which the Tibetan preinitial system has been retained in the phonology. Janhunen et al. reports that older speakers retain the pre-initial system, but that for younger speakers, it has largely collapsed into a three-way voice-aspiration division. Sandman, and hence Wiktionary, transcribes only the "collapsed" system. The IAIA system suggests that even the voiced series is sometimes merged into the unaspirated series, but Wiktionary does not take this into account.

The IAIA reports that no less than eleven different consonants are permitted in consonant-final position, whereas Janhunen et al. states that the nasal finals have all been neutralized to a nasal vowel, and that all other finals have variably weakened to /-ᵡ/ or been lost, with compensatory raising of preceding /ɑ/ to /e/. In fact, virtually all of the preliminary transcriptions made by the IAIA simply ignore the plosive finals, suggesting that these are not easily audibly perceptible.

In the absence of a corresponding term in Janhunen et al. 2008 or Sandman 2012, the following lemmatization scheme is used:

• IAIA <-m>, <-n>, <-ng> are lemmatized in the Janhunen-Sandman scheme for nasals.
• Other non-nasal finals in IAIA are deleted, unless Janhunen-Sandman <-k> can be regularly predicted on the basis of the Mandarin or Tibetan etymons.

Note also that pinyin orthographic rules apply, hence <yi->, <wu->, etc.