Tungusic languages
language family
The Tungusic languages (; also known as Manchu–Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in eastern Siberia and northern China by Tungusic peoples. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. Today, the most spoken language in the family is Xibe, a southern Tungusic language spoken by a group that migrated from Manchuria to Xinjiang in the 18th century. It is followed by the northern Tungusic languages Evenki, spoken in Northeast China and the Russian Far East, and Even, in northeastern Siberia. Many Tungusic languages are critically endangered, including Manchu, the most historically influential of this family and an official language of the Qing Empire. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus").
Classification
Linguists working on Tungusic have proposed a number of different classifications based on different criteria, including morphological, lexical, and phonological characteristics. Some scholars have criticized the tree-based model of Tungusic classification and argue that the long history of contact among the Tungusic languages makes them better treated as a dialect continuum.
The main classification is into a northern branch and a southern branch (Georg 2004) although the two branches have no clear division, and the classification of intermediate groups is debatable.
Four mid-level subgroups are recognized by Hölzl (2018), namely Ewenic, Udegheic, Nanaic, and Jurchenic.
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