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The Hui people (Chinese: 回族; pinyin: Huízú, Xiao'erjing: حُوِ ذَو ) are a Chinese ethnic group, typically distinguished by their practice of Islam. Hui is the abbreviation of the full name Huihui "回回", which is the diminutive form of HuiE "回纥 / 回鶻". They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. They are concentrated in Northwestern China (Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang), but communities exist across the country. Most Hui are similar in culture to Han Chinese with the exception that they practice Islam, and have some distinctive cultural characteristics as a result. For example, as Muslims, they follow Islamic dietary laws and reject the consumption of pork, the most common meat consumed in Chinese culture, and have also given rise to their variation of Chinese cuisine, Chinese Islamic cuisine and Muslim Chinese martial arts. Their mode of dress also differs only in that men wear white caps and women wear headscarves or (occasionally) veils, as is the case in most Islamic cultures. ( The definition of Hui after 1949 does not include ethnic groups such as the Uyghur, who live in the Mainland China and also practice Islam. The common ancestors of majority of Hui People and Uyghur people in Hami and Northern Xinjiang were Uyghurs who built the Uyghur Empire. After the fall of the Uyghur Empire, four groups fled to Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia and two groups fled to Southern Xinjiang who intermarried with local Tocharian people. Only the Uyghur People retain the Turkic language. Prior to 1949, the definition of Hui referred to Chinese Muslim with Turkic ancestry which later extended to non-Turkic Muslim such as Southern Chinese Muslim who were predominantly Malay and Arabic origins. Included among the Hui in Chinese census statistics (and not officially recognized as a separate ethnic group) are several thousand Utsuls in southern Hainan province, who speak an Austronesian language (Tsat) related to that of the Cham Muslim minority of Vietnam, and who are said to be descended from Chams who migrated to Hainan. A traditional Chinese term for Islam is 回教 (pinyin: Huíjiào, literally "the religion of the Hui"), though today it is mainly in use in Singapore, Taiwan, and other overseas Chinese communities; the most prevalent term within the PRC is the transliteration 伊斯蘭教 (pinyin: 'Yīsīlán jiào, literally "Islam religion").