Manchus

This language interests me...Is it even spoken anymore or is it extinct?

Do you know kind of when it died out of common use?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language
It still has 20 to 70 speakers!

From what I know, the northern Han have mixed so extensively with Mongols, Manchus, and ect it's kind of hard to tell.

There's a group of people called the Sibe in NW China (Xinjiang) who speak a language very similar to Manchu.  They were moved there by Emperor Qianlong in 1764.  There are still Sibe books being published over there.

If you can read Chinese, there is an interesting Manchu forum online at http://www.jaksa.org/forum/.  Interestingly enough, some scholars make the case that the current official Mandarin variant in China has heavy Altaic influence (the biggest Altaic languages in China's history being Mongolian and Manchu).

Originally posted by sahaliyan There's a group of people called the Sibe in NW China (Xinjiang) who speak a language very similar to Manchu.  They were moved there by Emperor Qianlong in 1764.  There are still Sibe books being published over there. If you can read Chinese, there is an interesting Manchu forum online at http://www.jaksa.org/forum/.  Interestingly enough, some scholars make the case that the current official Mandarin variant in China has heavy Altaic influence (the biggest Altaic languages in China's history being Mongolian and Manchu).

That's actually what I was taught.  I heard true classical Chinese is best preserved in Cantonese.

And russian Manchus(Orochon,Evenk,Nanai,Ulchi,Udegei) still living in Khabarovsk,Primore,Sakhalin,Saha republic,Chita,Irkutsk,Amur,and krasnoyarsk.But I think they are almost forget their native language.

this is what interests me.

the qing dynasty ended less than a century ago. how could the language disappear so fast?

did the qing officials and royal members speak manchu? or they spoke mandarin? manchu was once the official language along with han chinese in china (the most populas country in the world even back then) less than a century ago. during the qing dynasty, all official documents came out in three languages, manchu, han chinese, and mongolian.

and now almost no one can read it, and fewer than 200 out of 1.3 billion people can speak it. i mean that sounds crazy.

Edited by coolstorm

there was no such a term as "official language" during the qing dynasty. in china proper, all government documents were written in both han chinese and manchuria. in mongolia, they were written in han chinese, manchu, and mongolian. in tibet, they were written in han chinese, tibetan, and manchu.