the dungan language is the native language of the dungan people, a ethnic group living in regions of the former soviet union and xinjiang who are descendants of hui people. the dungan call their own language the hui language. it is a daughter language of mandarin chinese based on gansu and shaanxi dialects, and speakers of both dialects can largely understand each other. this is called mutual intelligibilty. like chinese, it is both tonal and analytic. however, differences between dungan and chinese are that dungan is written in cyrillic instead of chinese characters and there are differences in vocabulary. dungan has more arabic and persian loanwords and several terms are no longer used in standard chinese.