ABSTRACT
Yellow Uyghur, also called Western Yughur, is a Turkic language isolated from the main bulk of Turkic. Ninety percent of its speakers live in Sunan Yughur Autonomous County of Gansu Province, China. Salar is the other Turkic language spoken only in China. In the classification of Turkic, it belongs to the southwestern (SW) branch. Contemporary Salar has no written form. However, clear evidence shows that Salar was written in Arabic-based Turki script until the nineteenth century. Like other Oghuz languages, Salar belongs to the aya? subgroup; the intervocalic consonant for ‘foot’ is aya?. The consonant system is very similar to the Yellow Uyghur system, but Salar lacks a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated consonants.
