“…In the Qinghai-Gansu (Amdo) Sprachbund, languages from all four groups have converged in morphosyntactic, phonological, and lexical aspects. As Mongolic and Tibetan speakers acquired Northwest Mandarin centuries ago for trade and through intermarriage, local Sinitic varieties began to emerge which shifted to OV word order, developed case, number, and tense-aspect morphology, and reduced or lost tone (see, e.g., Dwyer, 1992Dwyer, , 1995Peyraube, 2017;Sandman, 2021;Zhu et al, 1997). A large number of Turkic speakers shifted to Mongolic in the 13-14th centuries, when the Mongol empire ruled China, which shaped the early development of local Mongolic varieties like Santa (Field, 1997, p.…”