3 Manchu – Tungus

As in the case of the Turkic and the Mongolian languages, we shall briefly classify the Manchu-Tungus family or stock and then say something about the language distribution of this group – the third of the Altaic phila – which is very interesting and important linguistically, albeit less so as a medium of literary culture. Manchu-Tungus is not as widely distributed as Turkic and Mongolian. Essentially, it consists of two sub-groups or sub-families, the Southern Tungusic group, and the Northern Tungusic group, as follows: 1) The Southern Tungusic group, divided into: i. Southeast or Lower subgroup (incl. Nanai or Goldi, Orok, Ulcha, Oroch and Udege or Udihe) ii. Southwest or Manchu subgroup (incl. Jurchen [extinct], Manchu, Sibe [Xibo]) 2) Northern Tungusic group (incl. Evenki or Tungus proper, Even or Lamut, Negidal, and Solon) As with Turkic and Mongolian, there is no agreement among Tungusologists and linguists on the classification of this group of languages, eight of which are spoken in Russia and five in . There are at present four or five different classifications, none of which attracts the majority of Tungusologists. The one offered above is a reasonable compromise. For other systems, cf. AWL, LAC, ESAPT, Tu, IAL, and TMY (Bibl. 6.1). According to N. Poppe (IAL, p. 26), the languages of the northern group comprise Negidal, Evenki (or Tungus proper), Lamut and Solon; all the other languages (Jurchen, Manchu, Goldi, etc.) belong to the southern group. According to G. Doerfer (1978; Bibl. 6.1) the general classification of the is: 1) Manchu (incl. Jurchen), 2) Nanai (incl. Ulcha, Orok and Kili), 3) Udege (incl. Oroch), 4) Evenki (incl. Solon and Negidal), 5) Even. There is no agreement either on the names of these languages, e.g. Nanai (formerly Goldi) is called by the Chinese Hezhe. As for the distribution of Manchu-Tungus speakers, they are spread over a territory of more than 5 million km2 comprising virtually all of eastern (including ) and the northern part of , as well as areas of North China and , with some spill-over into Mongolia. 256 CHAPTER THREE

The number of these Manchu-Tungus speakers has now shrunk dramatically because the present generation has largely adopted Russian and Chinese. In 1991 the Tungus population of Russia was a little over 66,000 of whom only 24,000 still spoke the ethnic languages. In 1990 the total Manchu-Tungus population of China, i.e. the five nationalities (ch. minzu) it consisted of, was just over 10 million, but of these only 46,000 still spoke their ethnic languages (plus a little over 1,000 in Mongolia). Of the 9.8 million Manchus, hardly any know the Manchu language: in 1982 there were 140 native speakers left; ten years later they were reduced to about 50, all of them in , and in March 2007 fluent native speakers of ‘genuine’ Manchu were less than twenty individuals living in a single village just north of . In 2000 the Sibe nationality, speaking a dialect of Manchu and living west of Kuldja in the northwestern tip of Xinjiang, as well as in , had a population of 189,000. In March 2007 about 30,000 Sibe still spoke their native tongue. Ac- cording to the 2000 census in China and the 2002 census in Russia, there was a slight increase in the number of the Tungus population. The latest census can be broken down as follows (in brackets we give the percentages of native speakers; however, their language proficiency is unknown): 67,000 Evenki, including among others Solon and Khamnigan (43%), Even 20,000 (36%), Nanai 18,000 (33%), Negidal 600 (21%), Sibe 188,000 (18%), Oroqen 8,000 (15%), Udege 1,700 (6%), Orok 350 (?), Ulcha 3,000 (?), Oroch 700 (?), Manchu over 10 million (0.001%). This means that at the time only about 37% of the Tungus population of Russia was able to speak their language. In China, without taking into account Manchu, the number is even lower (about 22%). As we would expect, fluency in Russian or Chinese is very high among Tungus people, e.g. nearly 93% of the Evenki of Russia who belong to the group that has preserved its own language fairly well knew also Russian. Efforts are being made, however, to preserve the language and culture of these people: Manchu grammars and dictionaries, as well as linguistic studies, are published in China and the language is kept ‘alive’ against great odds. Some of these Manchu-Tungus-speaking people have rich oral traditions and shamanistic beliefs which have been studied by ethnographers and anthropologists, such as S. M. Shirokogoroff (1887-1939), who also collected a mass of linguistic material recently published by G. Doerfer (Bibl. 6.4). Sibe oral literature, consisting of