These words are like the wind on the grassland, blowing them away with just one blow. "In Jishishan, Gansu Province, Baoshan Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Baoshan, Dongxiang, Salar Autonomous County, a hoarse chant can be heard from a herder's tent - Ma Zhanhai, an elderly member of the Baoan ethnic group, is singing a hundred year old song in Baoan language. Professor Min Chunfang from the School of Literature at Lanzhou University sat on the felt, with her recording pen tightly pressed against the old man's lips, afraid of missing a syllable. Not long after, the old man known as the last "living dictionary" of the Baoan tribe passed away, taking with him 37 ancient Persian loanwords - words that were once used to describe the orientation of the stars in Zoroastrian rituals, now only a scribble of Latin letters in his notebook. At the end of 2024, Min Chunfang led the language contact research team at Lanzhou University to be selected as one of the 24 approved projects for the National Social Science Fund's Rare and Unique Learning Research Project under the "Research on Endangered and Contact Languages in Northwest Ethnic Regions from the Perspective of Language Contact". Racing against time and documenting contact with endangered languages is an important branch of linguistics. Since 2012, Min Chunfang has focused her main energy on the study of the contact between Chinese dialects and minority languages in the northwest ethnic region, and has formed a language contact research team. The northwest region is a rich mine of language resources and a 'natural corridor' for language contact research In Min Chunfang's view, there are more than 50 ethnic groups such as Han, Tibetan, Hui, and Salar living here, and bilingual or multilingual phenomena are ubiquitous, such as "a family speaking three or four dialects" and "different languages in the east, west, north, and south of a street", forming a unique regional language feature. However, the wave of modernization is accelerating the extinction of regional dialects and minority languages, and the rate of extinction is even faster than people imagine. In Gareng Township, Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, Qinghai Province, 24-year-old Salar youth Han Haiming skillfully browses short videos. A bilingual barrage of Chinese and Sarah language mixed on the screen of his phone flashed through his fingertips. My grandfather can sing 300 Sarah folk songs, but I can't even remember all 30 of them, "he said to the research team with a bitter smile. Min Chunfang and her team found through research that the population of Salar language speakers has decreased from 120000 in the 1950s to less than 70000 today, with only 15% of the adolescent population being proficient users. The ancient nomadic related words such as "camel caravan" and "wool rolling felt" are being replaced by modern Chinese words such as "live streaming e-commerce" and "new energy vehicles". In the summer of 2024, Min Chunfang led her team to travel extensively in Jishishan, Linxia Prefecture, Dongxiang, Sala Autonomous County, Sunan Yugur Autonomous County, Zhangye City, and Zhuoni County, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, conducting in-depth and detailed investigations of Dongxiang language of Dongxiang ethnic group, Bao'an language of Bao'an ethnic group, eastern Yugu language and western Yugu language of Yugu ethnic group, as well as the "contact languages" that exist in these places. In the end, the notebook brought back by the team recorded more than 3000 Dongxiang and Bao'an language words, of which about 40% were marked in red as "endangered" or "endangered". For a language without words, the death of an elderly person may make dozens of words disappear forever Min Chunfang said, "We must race against time to leave traces for these words." Using modern technology to draw an "electrocardiogram" for language, the team did not just let go of the collected language materials. Instead, they used modern technology such as corpus analysis, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, etc. to conduct quantitative and qualitative research on language contact phenomena, in order to improve the scientific and accurate nature of the research. The Minchunfang team has built the first Northwest Endangered Language Dynamic Corpus in China. In the corpus presented to reporters by team members, an audio waveform of "Moonlight" is densely labeled with Altaic language tone markers, as if drawing an "electrocardiogram" for the language. Within the entire corpus, 280000 pieces of speech data, 1900 hours of video recordings, and grammar matrices for 43 languages are encoding the most primitive genes for the continuation of civilization. In Min Chunfang's view, obscure research must break down disciplinary barriers in order to promote in-depth and expanded research. She often compares historical comparative linguistics, ethnic sociology, and life genetics science to the "three keys" to breaking endangered languages and accessing language codes. Only by combining these disciplines can the study of ethnic languages be further deepened. Min Chunfang believes that language contains a wealth of information that can provide evidence for solving many historical mysteries. For example, through the research of the team, it was found that although the Chinese dialects in the Ganqing Hehuang region belong to the Sino Tibetan language family, they are highly similar to the Altair language in terms of word order and case markers. This is not genetic inheritance, but the imprint of millennium integration. "With solid field research and scientific research methods, Min Chunfang and her team have gained a lot. In the past 10 years, the team has published more than 60 papers and 7 academic works, and their research results have received attention from the international linguistic community. Luo Duan, a senior researcher at the Institute of East Asian Languages of the French National Academy of Sciences and a renowned sinologist, once stated that the team has provided a new paradigm for the study of Eurasian language contact and a "Chinese sample" for global language contact research. The international academic community once believed that Chinese was an 'island language', but our results have proven the openness of Chinese Min Chunfang said with satisfaction. Being obscure is not obscure, and cultivating versatile experts in the study of rare and rare languages is similar to other obscure fields. There is also a talent gap in endangered languages and contact language research. Min Chunfang has a unique approach to stimulating students' interest. She took the students to the high slope of Qilian Mountain Ranch. As the sun set in the west, they turned on the recording device and heard the Yugur herders singing "Migration Tune" in ancient Turkic language from afar. The sound waves danced on the monitor screen, forming a continuous mountain range. This is the sound of 'wind', in Yugur language, it is called 'khara'... "In this scene, she interprets the ancient Turkic language for the students; She took the students to 'Shaanxi Village' in Kazakhstan. The "Wugeng Tune" sung by the Donggan elderly man Heiyazi Zhang in the Shaanxi Gansu dialect of the Qing Dynasty was entered into the "Donggan Language Digital Gene Bank" by the team, and the process also recorded the disappearance of this "19th century Northwest dialect living fossil"; She also took students to seven cities and one county in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture to investigate Chinese dialects, 24 townships in Dongxiang County, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture to investigate Dongxiang language and Dongxiang Chinese, and even to investigate the language of the "Tuomao people" at the foot of the Qilian Mountains in Qinghai... "Only by making students interested, experienced, and productive in the research process can they persist," said Min Chunfang. She encourages students to participate more in interdisciplinary, cross regional, and cross linguistic international cooperation and exchanges, extensively explore and integrate ancient and modern, and blend Chinese and Western cultures, becoming a "versatile" linguist in linguistic research. In interdisciplinary cooperation and international exchanges, she keeps the obscure and unique. Learning continues. (New Society)