Historical language contact between Sibe and Khorchin

The Sibe of Xinjiang have been recognized as speakers of a Manchu variety by
linguists. However, for the Sibe speakers themselves, the situation is more
complicated. For certain reasons, the Sibe often present themselves as a group whose
historical origins are different from the Manchus. Several mentions occur in
historical sources about Sibe being vassals to the Khorchin Mongols before “becoming
Manchus”. This has been used among the arguments for the non-Manchu identity
of the Sibe.

In recent years, academic discussion has focused on the ethnic identity of the
Manchus, and, to a lesser extent, also on the position of the Sibe in relation to
the Manchus. In this paper I try to select out features of possible Khorchin, i.e.
eastern Mongolian, origin, in Sibe which may have come from direct language
contact. I discuss several morphological features of Mongolic origin which seem
not to be shared by other Manchu varieties, and one remarkable Sibe feature of
Khorchin origin (the emphatic prefix me-). In addition, I mention the existence of
lexical evidence of direct contact which is found in more conservative layers of
Sibe vocabulary. Another question concerns the significance of this evidence for
imagining the Sibe history. The linguistic situation in central Manchuria during the
period concerned (15th–16th centuries) suggests that if the shared features indeed
come from this period, they may rather be remnants of an extinct linguistic
environment characterized by intense Mongolic-Tungusic contacts than of bilateral
contact between two distinct groups – Khorchins and Sibe.