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Present Y Chromosomes Refute the Roma/Gypsy Origin of the Xuejiawan People in Northwest China

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Languages and Genes in Northwestern China and Adjacent Regions

Abstract

Since a journalist reported in 1947 that the Xuejiawan people of Northwestern China had an ancient Gypsy origin, these so-called eastern gypsies have attracted wide publicity. Nonetheless, regarding the ethnic origins of the Xuejiawan people, scholars from different disciplines have stuck to their opinions, which mainly comprise three popular hypotheses (the ancient Gypsy, the Han Chinese, and the southern Hmong-Mien origin hypothesis). The results of genetic and genealogical investigation, which involved 118 male individuals from six representative clans (Liú (刘), Liǔ (柳), Gao (高) , He (何), Hao (郝) and Guo (郭)), showed that no western Eurasian lineages have been observed in the Xuejiawan people. The previous literature treated the Xuejiawan language as a mysterious non-Han language, or even a language of Gypsies who migrated to China. However, a linguistic comparison of it with other potentially associated languages found that this language was a kind of argot, called Shaoju in Chinese, rather than a foreign language. Our article showed with abundant proof that many words have been derived from various gang languages. And their phonology, morphology and syntax have to be classified into the Chinese language system. Overall, the Gypsy origin cannot be accepted as true due to the paternal gene pool. The wide-ranging linguistic comparison also supported this viewpoint. Taken together, these suggested that the extant Xuejiawan people are more likely to be a subgroup of the Chinese majority Han.

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the volunteers and the local guide Xiaosheng Li for sample collection. This work was partly supported by NSFC for Excellent Young Scholars (31222030), MOE Scientific Research Project (113022A), the Shanghai Shuguang Project (14SG05), the French National Research Agency (No. ANR-12-BSH2-0004-01), the Natural Science Foundation of Gansu province (1308RJZA190), and the Scientific Research Project for Colleges of Gansu Province (2014A-085).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Shaoqing Wen

  2. Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), 63 Rue des Grands Moulins, 75013, Paris, France

    Shaoqing Wen & Dan Xu

  3. CRLAO (CNRS), Paris, France

    Dan Xu

  4. Key Laboratory of Evidence Science of Gansu Province, Gansu Institute of Political Science and Law, Lanzhou, 730070, People’s Republic of China

    Hongbing Yao

  5. MOE Key Laboratory of Contemporary Anthropology, School of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200438, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Li

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  1. Shaoqing Wen
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Correspondence to Shaoqing Wen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Département Chine, INALCO Département Chine, Paris Cedex, Paris, France

    Dan Xu

  2. School of Life Sciences, Fudan University School of Life Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Hui Li

Supporting Information

Supporting Information

Table S1. Y-chromosome SNP and STR data for the Xuejiawan people.

Table S2. The detailed results of coalescence time estimations for each paternal lineage in the Xuejiawan population using both BATWING and ASD methods (time in years).

Doc S1. Median-joining networks of Y-STR haplotypes for the remaining three paternal lineages (C3-S-F2613+,M407- , O3a1c2-F238 and O3a2c1*-F2887 ).

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Wen, S., Xu, D., Yao, H., Li, H. (2017). Present Y Chromosomes Refute the Roma/Gypsy Origin of the Xuejiawan People in Northwest China. In: Xu, D., Li, H. (eds) Languages and Genes in Northwestern China and Adjacent Regions. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4169-3_7

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