Abstract

Eastern Yugur is a Mongolic language which might either belong to the Central Mongolic or Southern Mongolic branch (cf. Nugteren 2011: 20, 35-57) and, being spoken in north-western Gansu, is also located geographically in-between the Central and Southern Mongolic area. With an estimated 1000 speakers (Janhunen 2020: 6), it is the Mongolic language with the second-fewest speakers. Along with the rest of Southern Mongolic, its morphology has been described fairly well (Tenishev & Todaeva 1966, Jaġunasutu 1981, Bulučilaġu & Jalsan 1990, Nugteren 2003, Altansubud 2017, Sečencoġtu 2024). At the same time, there is a lack of research papers in morphosyntax and semantics, showing that this language still remains relatively inaccessible to functional-typological linguistics.

In our paper, we will address the first steps in our effort to create a corpus of Eastern Yugur. This includes the digitalization of language materials from existing text collections (Bolučilaġu & Jalsan 1988, Arslan et al. 2013, Tеmür et al. n.d.) and grammars, the creation of a standardized transcription, probably morpheme analysis, the creation of English translations of the existing materials (at least initially translating via Chinese) and the creation of a unified lexicon from existing dictionaries and wordlists (using (Bolučilaġu & Jalsan 1984, Ān et al. 2017, Sīqīncháokètú 2024).