The Shinekhen Buryat Variety: Preliminary Analysis

The aim of my presentation is to give an overview of the Shinehen Buryat people, their language and its present linguistic situation. Šenexēnei buryād, i.e. ‘the Buryats of Shinehen Region’ live in the northeastern part of the Inner Mongolia, China, in the Hulun Buir Province in Manchuria. In 2019, I had a great opportunity to visit them and collect some linguistic material. Today the Shinekhen Buryats are the strongest and most vigorous community in Hulun Buir. The Shinekhen Buryat people were able to preserve not only their culture, religion and a traditional way of life, but also their language, even more so than the Buryat people in Buryatia, Russia. Linguistically, the Shinekhen Buryat variety belongs to the Aga sub-dialect of Khori Buryat dialect, which can be proved by the almost identical phonetic, morphological and syntactic systems.