Manchu Language Dying Out

Meng Shujing with her grandson, Shi Junguang, and great-grandson, Shi Yaobin, in their hometown of Sanjiazi.
China's Manchu speakers struggle to save language

By David Lague
Published: International Herald Tribune,March 13, 2007

SANJIAZI, China: Seated cross- legged in her farmhouse on the kang, a brick sleeping platform warmed by a fire below, Meng Shujing lifted her chin and sang a lullaby in Manchu, softly but clearly.

After several verses, the 82-year-old widow stopped, her eyes shining.

"Baby, please fall asleep quickly," she said, translating a few lines of the song into Chinese. "Once you fall asleep, Mama can go to work. I need to set the fire, cook and feed the pigs."

After 5 children, 14 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren, Meng has the confidence that comes from long experience. "If you sing like this, a baby gets sleepy right away," she said.

She also knows that most experts believe the day is approaching when no child will doze off to the sound of these comforting words.

Ms. Meng is one of 18 residents of this isolated village in northeastern China, all older than 80, who, according to Chinese linguists and historians, are the last native speakers of Manchu.

Descendants of seminomadic tribesmen who conquered China in the 17th century, they are the last living link to a language that for more than two and a half centuries was the official voice of the Qing Dynasty, the final imperial house to rule from Beijing and one of the richest and most powerful empires the world has known.

With the passing of these villagers, Manchu will also die, experts say. All that will be left will be millions of documents and files in Chinese and foreign archives, along with inscriptions on monuments and important buildings in China, unintelligible to all but a handful of specialists.

"I think it is inevitable," said Zhao Jinchun, an ethnic Manchu born in Sanjiazi who taught at the village primary school for more than two decades before becoming a government official in the city of Qiqihar, 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, to the south. "It is just a matter of time. The Manchu language will face the same fate as some other ethnic minority languages in China and be overwhelmed by the Chinese language and culture."

(While most experts agree that Manchu is doomed, Xibo, a closely related language, is likely to survive a little longer. Xibo is spoken by about 30,000 descendants of members of an ethnic group allied to the Manchus who in the 18th century were sent to the newly conquered western region of Xinjiang. But it too is under relentless pressure from Chinese.)

The disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world's 6,800 languages by the end of the century. But few of these threatened languages have risen to prominence and then declined as rapidly as Manchu.

Within decades of establishing their dynasty in 1644, the Qing rulers had brought all of what was then Chinese territory under control. They then embarked on a campaign of expansion that roughly doubled the size of their empire to include Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia and Taiwan. However, the dynasty's fall in 1911 meant that the Manchus were relegated to the ranks of the more than 50 other ethnic minorities in China, their numbers dwarfed by the dominant Han, who today account for 93 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people, according to official statistics.

Indistinguishable by appearance, the Manchus have melded into the general population. There are now about 10 million Chinese citizens who describe themselves as ethnic Manchus. Most live in what are now the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, although there are also substantial numbers in Beijing and other northern cities.

For generations, the vast majority have spoken Chinese as their first language. Manchu survived only in small, isolated pockets like Sanjiazi, where, until a few decades ago, nearly all the residents were ethnic Manchus. Most are descended from the three main families that made up a military garrison established here in 1683 on the orders of the Qing emperor, Kangxi, to deter Russian territorial ambitions, according to Zhao.

The traditional Manchu-style wood- and-adobe farmhouses have largely been replaced by Chinese-style brick homes, the local residents say. The village now looks just like any other settlement in this region as a biting wind whips snow across the bare ground between the houses and the piles of dried cornstalks, stacked high to feed cattle and pigs through the winter.

Traditional shamanistic rites, along with ethnic dress and customs, have also been mostly abandoned, although some wedding and funeral ceremonies retain elements of Manchu rituals, Zhao said. But, villagers still observe one Manchu taboo that sets them apart from others in China's far northeast."We don't eat dog meat," Zhao said. "And we would never wear a hat made from dog fur." The prohibition, tradition has it, honors a dog credited with having saved the life of Nurhachi, the founder of the Manchu state, who lived from 1559 to 1626.

Even now, about three-quarters of Sanjiazi's 1,054 residents are ethnic Manchus but the use of Chinese has increased dramatically in recent decades as roads and modern communications have increasingly exposed them to the outside world. Only villagers of Meng's generation now prefer to speak Manchu.

"We are still speaking it, we are still using it," said Meng, a cheerful woman with thick gray hair pulled back in a neat bun. "If the other person can't speak Manchu then I'll speak Chinese."

But Meng disputes the findings of visiting linguists that there are 18 villagers left who can still speak fluently. By her standards, only five or six of her neighbors are word-perfect in Manchu.

Zhao, 53, on the other hand, estimates that about 50 people in the village have a working grasp of the language.

"My generation can still communicate in Manchu," he said, although he acknowledged that most villagers speak Chinese almost all the time at home.

Meng supports efforts to keep the language alive. Her 30-year-old grandson, Shi Junguang, has studied hard to improve his Manchu and teaches speaking and writing to the 76 pupils, 7 to 12 years old, at the village school.

This is the only primary school in China that offers classes in Manchu, according to officials from the local ethnic affairs office. These lessons, which Shi shares with one other teacher, take up only a small proportion of classroom time but they are popular with students, say the school's staff and other residents in the village.

"Because they are Manchus, they are interested in these classes," Shi said.

He is also teaching basic conversation to his 5-year-old son, Shi Yaobin, and encourages him to speak with his great-grandmother. "It would be a great blow for us if we lose our language," he said.

But most experts say that with so few people left to speak it, attempts to preserve Manchu are futile.

"The spoken Manchu language is now a living fossil," said Zhao Aping, an ethnic Manchu and an expert on Manchu language and history at Heilongjiang University in the provincial capital, Harbin. "Although we are expending a lot of energy on preserving the language and culture, it is very difficult. The environment is not right."

While scholars agree it is now only a matter of time before Manchu falls silent, in Sanjiazi, Meng clings to hope.

"I don't have much time," she said. "I don't even know if I have tomorrow. But I will use the time to teach my grandchildren.

"It is our language, how can we let it die? We are Manchu people."

It would be a tragedy for another language to be wiped out..

Hardly a tragedy. Not even an inconvenience. As matter of fact, it's the learning of yet another language that is an inconvenience. The world is getting smaller, ties between countries - stronger. It makes no sense to cling to old ways and cultivate a village-specific language that you have noone to talk to outside.

Some parts of culture are tied to the language. Reading translated books is not the same as reading them in the original language. But it's better than not reading them at all, or spending years on learning the language (poorly.)

I would understand if humans could learn languages easily and quickly by taking a pill or sleeping a few hours under a brain programming machine. But that isn't so. Human life is short, and learning of languages is hard for most people. I know a foreign language or two, but I woudn't want to study another one at this time.

The worst part is that all the languages on Earth are basically the same in terms of usefulness for exchange of ideas. Some are a bit more verbose (French) and some are a bit terser (English) but in essence they are all adequate; that's why we can translate books. There is no human language on Earth that would be significantly better than any other for any practical purpose. English frequently wins because of its simplicity, but that's minor. There is no language, for example, that would losslessly condense a chapter from Plato into one sentence. It means that learning more languages gives you only diminishing returns.

It should be retained by the people at the very least as a second-language (my emphasis)

How in the world would anyone go around telling people that they should learn a language that they don't want to learn?

I fully agree that a certain lost tribe of Pigmy warriors might have had a language that could be interesting from certain philological aspects. But does a scientist have a power, legal or moral, to force some other people to retain a language just because he, the scientist, thinks it's a good idea, culturally? Knowledge of a language is not free; in this example the child could learn Manchu or he could learn Japanese or English or Russian. What choice would give him the most benefit in life? Very few people have a natural affinity for languages.

with it the culture and distinctiveness of the people disappear

It's the "if the tree falls in a forest but there is nobody to hear it" argument. Why would anyone in particular want to be so distinctive? I don't see too many Native Indians walking around in the city in feathers and moccasins. That is part of their culture, but for some reason they think they'd be better off joining the world, not setting ourselves apart from it. Again it seems like people are told to do something because someone else believes that it's in global interests of humanity. I can think of many things offhand that would certainly benefit the humanity as a whole, but unfortunately I don't know how to convince any given human to do them - especially when it requires sacrifices. AGW theory is one hot example here; a bunch of people tell us that we must mend our ways, or else the end is nigh. Why aren't we so happy with their orders?

To lose a language is to lose a sense of self -- as with the Scots.

"A witty saying proves nothing," as Voltaire said once. Nobody is forcing anyone to forget or stop using a language. It's happening because people want it to happen.

similarly, in German it is easier to put literature, philosophy, but poetry works better in Romance or Celtic or Slavic languages.

Some of the languages that are "better for poetry" gain that position due to their immense complexity. In Russian every noun has six cases, as I understand, and they are all written differently, except when they are not :-) With a language that malleable you certainly can write some poetry; but how many people would be willing to learn that language just to read your verses? You can't take a rush course of a language that is barely sufficient for a tourist and then go and dive into some serious literature. You'd get a cardboard cutout of the work, even if that much.

English due to its easy-going nature (or rather, how it is now, not Edwardian/Victorian English) tends to simplify much and lose much of the nuances that are there in other languages -- also, with the lose of grammar such as declinations etc. a lot of the shades of meaning are lost

There is a theorem in computer science that says: "For every sufficiently advanced computer language there is a program that prints its own source code." Applied to natural languages, the same reasoning tells us that any human language is sufficiently advanced to express any meaning. You may lose brevity, but all the bits of information will be there.

By the way, did you notice that a good half of "War and Peace" is written in French? Of course that is immediately translated into the primary language of the book, be it Russian or English. The author used French to create the proper atmosphere but that message was quickly lost along with the knowledge of French among the aristocracy. Did the use of a foreign language add much to the message? I doubt it; after all, I can't read French :-) Besides, the dialogs primarily deal with quite pedestrian matters; here is a quick example:

"Ah! ne me parlez pas de ce départ, ne m'en parlez pas. Je ne veux pas en entendre parler"

"Oh, don't speak of his going, don't! I won't hear it spoken of,"

What is here to be excited about? What did I lose by not reading it in French?

Also, the world is learning English, but English is also devolving into various "dialects" -- rapidly.

Languages always were a great tool to divide and conquer. If you want to create your own secret society there is nothing better than to start with your own secret language (Michael Moorcock wrote on that subject.) People who want to work with some other people learn their language. People who want to set themselves apart create their own language.

In this aspect you can reasonably complain that people are not only coming together but also separating. This is natural; it always happened and will probably be happening for a while. You may have reasons to be concerned that some people are setting themselves apart, but this has nothing to do with the language; the language is an effect of a 3^rd order. The primary cause of separation lies elsewhere.

English is the language of the Internet, international commerce, and popular entertainment (films and music)

you're somewhat right about the language of the Internet, but not completely -- Chinese and even Russian are taking hold with newer releases that are unicode compatible. You are more or less correct about international commerce, though it is French in Francophone west Africa and Spanish in Latin America and Arabic in the Middle East when they trade among themselves

you are wrong about popular entertainment -- I was surprised when I moved to Poland last year that many Poles didn't know some common American movies, cartoons etc. that for us is common cultural knowledge -- they have their own films in their own languages

And friends in India point out that they make the most movies -- in fact they have several "hollywoods" in different langauges: hindi, tamil, oriya, marathi, konkani, telugu, malayalam etc. -- and these are surprisingly popular in Russia and the Middle East and South-East Asia.

Let me add that many native English speakers (Americans, British, Australian etc) wrongly assume that since much of the World speaks English that they are in a better position to understand the rest of the World or that the Anglo-Saxon Worldview is predominant.

As a second language English speaker I can tell you there is a difference between speaking English and thinking in English. We might speak excellent English, but we don't think in English, some of us think in Swahili, Hausa, Hindi etc.

That is why it is extremely foolhardy to suggest, for example, that the Americans and Indians share the same values simply because many Indians speak English.

It's also true that Americans vastly overestimate the reach of Hollywood. In Africa for example, Nigerian movies rule. Most Africans don't know who Brad Pitt is but are emotionally connected to Nigerian actors. In the Gulf states and South Asia, Bollywood rules. Latin American telenovelas have a cult following in places as diverse as Russia, Mexico and much of Africa (I grew up watching "The Rich also Cry").

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Thanks Cronos. ...the dominant Han, who today account for 93 percent of the country's 1.3 billion people, according to official statistics. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.