Origini e caratteri del lessico islamico della lingua dungana

The present work concerns the Islamic lexicon of standard Dungan, a Sinitic lan- guage spoken in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by about 150,000 descendants of Chinese Muslims, developed during Soviet times into a vibrant literary language written with a Cyrillic-based orthography. Due to its unique status among Sinitic languages, the Dun- gan language has drawn much scholarly attention to its divergencies from standard and dialectal Chinese, but especially for the numerous and profound traces left in it by its long-standing symbiosis with neighbouring languages of culture such as Arabic, Classical Persian, Eastern Turkic, and, in the last century, Russian; nonetheless, there is still a want of a comprehensive study of the Islamic stratum of Dungan lexicon. This contribution, intended as a preliminary study on the subject, is aimed at circumscribing and describing linguistically the Islamic lexicon of modern Dungan against the backdrop of other lexical strata, attempting, in addition, to trace its origins to the literary culture of 19th Century Chinese Islamism, and to explain why, due to persistent structural constraints, literary Dungan is still hostile to direct lexical borrowing except, partially, from Russian. Included here is also a list of 108 Perso-Arabic loanwords in literary Dungan, derived from primary bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, with a linguistic commentary.