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Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying Language
In their village in northeastern China, Meng Shujing, 82, standing at left, and her friends and neighbors are among the last native speakers of Manchu, the dying language of the former Qing dynasty, Chinese linguists say.Credit...Lionel Derimais for The International Herald Tribune
By David Lague
· March 18, 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, Ms. Meng, a 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.”
“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 the song’s comforting words.
Ms. Meng is one of 18 residents of this isolated village in northeastern China, all over 80 years old, 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 — about 60 tons of Manchu-language documents are in the provincial archive in Harbin alone — 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 Qiqihar, a city about 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.”
The disappearance of Manchu will be part of a mass extinction of languages that some experts forecast will lead to the loss of half of the world’s 6,800 languages by the end of the century. Few of these threatened languages have declined so rapidly, from such prominence, as Manchu.
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Meng Shujing, 82, left, her grandson, Shi Junguang, 30, and his son, Shi Yaobin, 5, try to keep the Manchu language alive in northeastern China.Credit...Lionel Derimais for The International Herald Tribune
Indistinguishable by appearance, the Manchus have since melded into the general population. About 10 million Chinese citizens now describe themselves as ethnic Manchus. Most live in what are now the northeastern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang, although substantial numbers also live 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.
Even now, about three-quarters of Sanjiazi’s 1,054 residents are ethnic Manchus but the use of Chinese has spread sharply in recent decades as roads and modern communications have increasingly exposed them to the outside world. Only villagers of Ms. Meng’s generation prefer to speak Manchu.
“We are still speaking it, we are still using it,” said Ms. 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 she disputes the findings of visiting linguists that 18 villagers are left who can still speak fluently. By her standards, only five or six of her neighbors fit that description.
Mr. Zhao, 53, estimates that 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 now speak Chinese almost all the time at home.
Ms. Meng’s 30-year-old grandson, Shi Junguang, has studied hard to improve his Manchu and teaches speaking and writing to the 76 pupils, aged 7 to 12, at the village school.
This is the only primary school in China that offers classes in Manchu, officials from the local ethnic affairs office said. These lessons, shared with one other teacher, take only a small proportion of classroom time, but are popular with students, say school staff members and other village residents.
“Because they are Manchus, they are interested in these classes,” Mr. Shi said.
He is also teaching basic conversation phrases 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 agree that attempts to preserve Manchu are futile with so few people left to speak it.
“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,” he added.
Despite the predictions that it is now only a matter of time before Manchu falls silent, in Sanjiazi, Ms. Meng clings to hope.