Manchu is not dead

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Listen for yourself:

Posted by Wikitongues, who also provided this explanation:

Manchu is a Tungusic language from Manchuria in Northeast China. Spoken in the Qing Dynasty, it is critically endangered, and its linguistic traditions continue with the Sibe people in the Northwest.

More from Wikipedia: "Manchu (Manchu:ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ, manju gisun) is a critically endangered East Asian Tungusic language native to the historical region of Manchuria in Northeast China. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912) of China, although today the vast majority of Manchus now speak only Mandarin Chinese. The Xibe (or Sibe) are often considered to be the modern custodians of the written Manchu language. The Xibe live in Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County near the Ili valley in Xinjiang, having been moved there by the Qianlong Emperor in 1764. Modern written Xibe is very close to Manchu, although there are slight differences in the writing system which reflect distinctive Xibe pronunciation. More significant differences exist in morphological and syntactic structure of the spoken Xibe language." Ronglu and Shiyu (at the center and left) are both Sibe and from Qapqal. Shihuan (at the right) is Manchu and lives in a village near the Heilong (“Black Dragon”) River, referred to in Manchu as Sahaliyan Ula.

The Manchu Qing dynasty ruled over the whole of China from 1644 to 1912, a total of 268 years, making it one of the longest dynasties in East Asian history.  Three of its emperors ruled for roughly 60 years each.  It expanded Chinese territory to its greatest extent (in 1790, it was the fourth-largest empire in world history), matched only by the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) which preceded it, separated by the ethnic Han Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which was three times smaller and three times less populous than the Manchu Qing.  And yet, in 1912, the Manchu empire collapsed colossally, taking its language with it.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Jichang Lulu]



3 Comments »

  1. Pamela said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 10:16 am

    Good to know. Efforts by the PRC government to "save" documentary Manchu date to the 1970s, and projects to record the last surviving Manchu speakers of the settlements around Sanjiazi village date to at least the 1990s, about the same time that Manchu identity organizations in Taiwan promoted learning to read (more than speak). Native fluency–one mode of language survival, but only one–necessarily decreases as the elderly population of these traditional villages declines (now to well under a hundred). Elementary schools in Sanjiazi taught Manchu from 2017, part of a pilot program to conduct second-language instruction in many of the "autonomous" regions of China (a program that has been strangled by increasing intolerance of the Xi regime for any kind of cultural particularisms). But documentary Manchu has been undead for decades, and spoken Manchu has been the object of preservation and revivalism for decades as well. But always nice to know that Manchu is still undead. It is still officially critically endangered, which may have contributed to it being an early AI project to recognize Manchu (as well as Tibetan, Mongolian and Uyghur) speech and attempt to reproduce it, which at the the time (2022) was a meaningful augmentation of the already extensive database in English and Chinese. The logic behind these projects seems to be based upon their increasing scarcity of native fluency speakers, literally substituting AI speakers for human ones.

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3199551/job-urgent-chinese-team-hopes-ai-can-save-manchu-language-extinction

  2. David Marjanović said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 3:08 pm

    and spoken Manchu has been the object of preservation and revivalism for decades as well.

    This is complicated by the fact that Manchu was never a single language – but the more divergent varieties were only recorded to any extent while they were going extinct in the mid-late 20th century.

  3. Y said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 3:23 pm

    Impressionistically, it sounds to me like the teacher and the students speak with some kind of Sinitic accent/phonology. Or am I just imagining it? I have no idea what non-Sinicized Manchu sounds like.

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