Tungusic languages
Language family of Siberia and Manchuria
The Tungusic languages 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").
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This entry incorporates text from “Tungusic languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.