Download The language of China`s last emperors, which acted as a vehicle for

The language of China's last emperors, which acted as a vehicle for high
culture for more than 300 years, is on the verge of extinction, spoken
now only by a handful of elderly people in the rural northeast, experts
warn."People who still speak the Manchu language are now confined to a
few elderly people in a small number of rural villages in northeastern
China," said Zhao Zhiqiang, who heads the Manchurian Research Institute
at the prestigious China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).While more
than 100 million people in China are currently classified by the
government as Manchurian in ethnicity, almost none of them speaks their
ancestral tongue.Manchu, once the official language of the Qing Dynasty
(1644-1912), lost its political weight with the dynasty's fall, triggered
by the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen.But experts have warned that a
knowledge of the tongue is crucial for anyone wanting to carry out
research into the Qing period of Chinese history."A lot of so-called
secret documents were written in Manchurian during the Qing dynasty,"
said Zhou Zehao, professor of information science at Pennsylvania’s York
College."All the classified documents were written in it."Bilingual
system<div style="width:305px;" class="image-left captioned">
Follow the link below to view story images
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/language12212010132856.html/manchuchinese305.jpg/image"
<span style="width:305px;">A sign using both Manchu and Chinese
writing in Beijing's Forbidden City. Credit: Wikipedia
<span class="copyright">Wikipedia
According to Zhou, the entire Qing bureaucracy was run as a bilingual
system which used Chinese and Manchurian in its record-keeping."Every
important document had both a Manchu and a Chinese version," Zhou
said."The Manchu language is crucial to an understanding of the history
of the Qing dynasty."The Manchurians also had an impact on the language
of the Koryo civilization on the Korean peninsula, and on the Mongolian
and Uyghur languages, Zhou added.A woman surnamed Sun with Manchu
ancestry from northeast China said that the Manchus had promoted the
development of Han culture, possibly to the detriment of their own,
making a 21st century revival even less likely."They didn't promote it
even while they were the emperors," Sun said. "So of course today it's
even more difficult to do that.""They used to practise Manchu, but I
almost never hear them speak it nowadays," she added.'Loan words'Experts
estimate that fewer than 70 people now speak Manchu, a Tungusic language.
A further 40,000 people in far western Xinjiang speak Xibe, which is in
many respects the same as Manchu, although the Xibe ethnicity is
considered distinct from that of Manchurians.Linguists say that Manchu is
derived mostly from the Jurchen language of 12th and 13th century
northeastern China.Written in a top-to-bottom flowing vertical phonetic
script taken from the Mongolian alphabet instead of in pictographic
characters like Chinese, Manchu also contains many loan words from
Mongolian and Chinese.The Mongolian script has been taught in primary
schools to ethnic Mongolian children in China, following a brief
experiment with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet before the Sino-Soviet
split of 1961.Reported by Yang Jiadai for RFA's Mandarin service.
Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.