Salar

Salar (autonym Salır gaçı; ISO 639-3 slr) is an Oghuz Turkic language and the easternmost geographical outlier of that branch. It is spoken mainly in Xunhua and Hualong in Qinghai and Jishishan in Gansu, with a smaller western community in the Ili region of Xinjiang. The larger eastern variety includes Jiezi and Mengda dialects, while Ili Salar has developed separately under stronger Uyghur and Kazakh influence. Centuries of contact with Northwestern Mandarin, Amdo Tibetan, Mongolic languages, and Islamic literary languages have strongly shaped its sound system and vocabulary, although its suffixing morphology and basic word order remain Turkic. Salar is primarily spoken and has no universally accepted standard orthography: historical texts used an Arabic-based script, several Latin systems have been proposed, and most speakers use Chinese for literacy and formal writing.