A Chinese Village Struggles to Save the Dying Language of a Once Powerful Dynasty (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

March 18, 2007

A Chinese Village Struggles to Save the Dying Language of a Once
Powerful Dynasty

By DAVID LAGUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/world/asia/18manchu.html?ref=world

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.”

(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 1700s 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 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.

Within decades of establishing their dynasty in 1644, the Qing rulers
brought all of what was then Chinese territory under control and 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 account for 93
percent of the country’s 1.3 billion people, according to official
statistics.

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. 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, Mr.
Zhao said.

The traditional Manchu-style wood and adobe farmhouses have largely been
replaced by Chinese-style brick homes, local residents say.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

Traditional shamanistic rites with ethnic dress and customs have also
been mostly abandoned, although some wedding and funeral ceremonies
retain elements of Manchu rituals, Mr. Zhao said. Villagers still
observe one Manchu taboo that sets them apart from others in China’s
far northeast.

“We don’t eat dog meat,” Mr. 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 (1559-1626), the
founder of the Manchu state.

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.

“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.”



Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company