Manchu language
Tungusic language originating from Northeast China
Manchu (ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ Manju gisun) is a critically endangered Tungusic language native to the historical region of Manchuria in Northeast China. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was the national language of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) of China, although today the vast majority of Manchus speak only Mandarin Chinese. Several thousand can speak Manchu as a second language through governmental primary education or free classes for adults in classrooms or online.
The Manchu language has high historical value for historians of China, especially for the Qing dynasty. Manchu-language texts supply information that is unavailable in Chinese, and when both Manchu and Chinese versions of a given text exist, they provide controls for understanding the Chinese.
Like most Siberian languages, Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian script (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Sogdian and then Uyghur). Although Manchu does not have the kind of grammatical gender found in most European languages, some gendered words in Manchu are distinguished by different stem vowels (vowel inflection), as in ama, 'father', and eme, 'mother'.
Names
The Qing dynasty used various Mandarin Chinese expressions to refer to the Manchu language, such as "Qingwen" (清文) and "Qingyu" (清語) ("Qing language").
“Manchu language” enters the record as tungusic language originating from Northeast China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Manchu, language and Tungusic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Manchu language” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Manchu, language and Tungusic provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q33638. The Library of Congress control number is sh85080397. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1644 and 1912.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Manchu language” 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.