Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture
Indo-European language speakers
Indo-European language speakers native to China are represented principally by Tajiks and Russians. The mother tongue of most Tajiks is Tajik, a language of Indo-Iranian group, but a number speak Uighur, a Turkic language. Tajik spoken in China lacks a writing system. Tajik speakers inhabit south-west Xinjiang and are distributed over approximately five counties with a total population of about 30,000. As a minority nationality, the Tajik people in China can be traced back to the Tang dynasty.
Their economy is based on farming and animal husbandry; families maintain a patriarchal system, and their religion is Islam.
Russian speakers, of which there are only about 3,000 in China, live scattered in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. They migrated from Russia in the nineteenth century and around the October Revolution in the early twentieth century. The Russian language in China is closely related to southern Russian in Russia, but it shows characteristics of pronunciation (accent) and vocabulary resulting from the influence of surrounding lanwriting system employs the Cyrillic alphabet. The guages such as Chinese, Uighur and Mongolian. The people’s lifestyle and convention is similar to that in Russia and their religion is the Orthodox Eastern Church. Many Russian speakers have relatives abroad, mainly in Russia, Australia and Canada, and a number of them have migrated abroad in the previous decades. The number of Russian speakers has thus decreased.
YANG LAN
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