Lexical Stratigraphy and Turkicization in the Xiongnu: An Iranian Prestige Layer in Chinese Transcriptions

Abstract

The Chinese historiographic record preserves ethnonyms, titles, personal names, and a modest set of glosses that later scholarship has treated as the principal basis for assigning a “Xiongnu language.” This paper reexamines this long-standing Xiongnu language problem by treating the Chinese-recorded information as a stratified lexical record rather than as evidence for a single stable vernacular. Instead of assigning the material to one language family, the analysis focuses on the internal distribution of proposed etymological layers and their sociolinguistic implications. A clear asymmetry emerges: Iranian-associated items cluster in early sources and are largely confined to institutional and pastoral vocabulary, whereas Turkic-associated items appear across both early and later layers and span a broader range of semantic domains. This pattern is most consistent with an early Iranian prestige or contact layer progressively assimilated within a Turkic-dominant communicative environment during the Xiongnu imperial period. The findings suggest that apparent support for competing single-family hypotheses reflects stratification within a small, transmitted corpus rather than mutually exclusive identifications.