Concept
Xiao'erjing (children's script), often shortened to Xiaojing (minor script, the 'original script' being the Perso-Arabic script), is the practice of writing Sinitic languages such as Mandarin (especially the Lanyin, Zhongyuan and Northeastern dialects) or Dungan in the Perso-Arabic script. It is used on occasion by many ethnic minorities who adhere to the Islamic faith in China (mostly the Hui, but also the Dongxiang and the Salar) and formerly by their Dungan descendants in Central Asia. Orthography reforms introduced the Latin script and later the Cyrillic script to the Dungan language, which continue to be used today. Xiao'erjing is written from right to left, like other writing systems using the Perso-Arabic script. The Xiao'erjing writing system is unusual among Arabic script-based writing systems in that all vowels, long and short, are explicitly marked at all times with Arabic diacritics; this means that Xiao'erjing is technically an abugida, in contrast to the abjad classification of most Perso-Arabic script varieties. This is also in contrast to some other Arabic-based writing systems in China, such as the Uyghur Ereb Yéziqi, which uses full letters and not diacritics to mark short vowels. Xiao'erjing does not have a single, standard name. In Shanxi, Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Eastern Shaanxi and also Beijing, Tianjin and the Northeastern provinces, the script is referred to as Xiǎo'érjīng, which when shortened becomes Xiǎojīng or Xiāojīng (the latter Xiāo has the meaning of "to review" in the aforementioned regions). In Ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Western Shaanxi and the Northwestern provinces, the script is referred to as Xiǎo'érjǐn. The Dongxiang people refer to it as the "Dongxiang script" or the "Huihui script"; The Salar refer to it as the "Salar script"; The Dungan of Central Asia used a variation of Xiao'erjing called the "Hui script", before being made to abandon the Arabic script for Latin and Cyrillic. According to A. Kalimov, a famous Dungan linguist, the Dungan of the former Soviet Union called this script щёҗин (şjoⱬin, 消經).
