Manchu language | History, Alphabet, & People | Britannica (original) (raw)

Also called:

Man language

Manchu language, the most historically influential of the Manchu-Tungus languages (a family within the Altaic language group), formerly spoken by the Manchu people in Manchuria and once a court language of the Qing dynasty. In 1995 fewer than 70 Manchu, all of whom were over age 70 and living in Heilongjiang province, were believed to still speak Manchu. Several thousand people, however, speak Sibo (Pinyin: Xibe), a closely related language found in the Yili region of Xinjiang.

Vowel harmony, in which vowels are divided into two or three classes, with the restriction that suffixes added must use vowels of the same class, is generally typical of the Altaic languages but is not as strictly observed in Manchu as in, for example, Mongol. The Manchu verb, like that of Chinese, distinguishes neither person nor number. Manchu has no relative pronouns and expresses relative clauses by means of participles and gerunds. A peculiarity of Manchu is the indication of masculine and feminine, or strong and weak, in a certain group of words by the alternation of the vowels a and e; thus, ama ‘father’ becomes eme ‘mother.’ Manchu has been a written language since the 17th century and uses a script borrowed from the Mongolian alphabet.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Zeidan.