Scattered in small speaking communities across Northeast Asia, there are around a dozen extant languages that make up an obscure language family. Yet, in its obscurity, is one language that was once used in official status in the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. So what is this language family?

With speaking communities totaling around 75,000 people, the Tungusic language family is a language family consisting of around a dozen extant languages, and several more extinct ones, used and spoken to varying extents across China, and Russia’s Siberia and the Far East. The word ‘Tungusic’ actually does not derive from any member languages; it actually derives from the Sakha language, from a word used to refer to the Evenki people who speak one of the Tungusic languages. Many of these languages are endangered to varying extents today, with some revitalisation programmes in place to preserve or improve speaker numbers within the respective communities.

Within the Tungusic languages, the most well-known is perhaps the Manchu language. Once serving as an official language in governmental affairs during Qing China, the Manchu language has seen a precipitous decline, with most Manchus shifting towards speaking Chinese towards the dynasty’s later years. Today, speaker numbers are extremely difficult to come by, with estimates suggesting that there could only be a few hundred or a few thousand speakers of Manchu today, out of a population of 10 million ethnic Manchu people, pretty much all of whom speak Mandarin Chinese. Manchu actually developed from a predecessor language called the Jurchen language, preserved in some inscriptions written in the Jurchen script.

Manchu is quite closely related to the most commonly-spoken Tungusic language, called the Xibe language. Accounting for nearly half of the number of Tungusic language speakers, the Xibe language is predominantly spoken in Xinjiang, and shares some degree of mutual intelligibility with the Manchu language. Another prominent Tungusic language is the Evenki language, spoken by around 25,000 native speakers in communities in the Sakha Republic in Russia, and Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia in China. This is not to be confused with the Even language, spoken by around 6000 people in Siberia, more specifically in Magadan Oblast, Autonomous Chukot Okrug, and Kamchatka Krai.

Classifying the Tungusic languages has proven quite a challenge. Traditionally, grammatical, lexical, and phonological similarities have been used to propose genealogical relationships between languages, allowing the proposal of possible changes that have occurred over time that resulted in the divergence of the Tungusic languages. It is thought that the Tungusic languages would have had extensive contact with one another, resulting in several convergences and divergences between the traditional main branches of the Tungusic languages, making distinctions pretty unclear. Other regional influences would also have had played a role, such as influences from the Chinese varieties, Korean, the Mongolic languages, and Turkic languages like Sakha. I think one of the more unusual influences I have read about is that from the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan languages, from which the Northern Tungusic languages like Evenki have borrowed some words. Today, however, influences from Russian and Mandarin Chinese would be substantially stronger.

Among the Tungusic languages, only Jurchen (later Manchu) has a strong written tradition. With inscriptions and stelae dating back to the 12th century, the Jurchen script, based on Khitan characters, was once used to write the Jurchen language. Later, in the 17th century, the Jurchen language would be officially referred to as the Manchu language, and an alphabet based on the traditional Mongolian script would be commissioned and used as the primary writing system. This script, called the Manchu script, preserves the top-to-bottom, left-to-right writing direction which is iconic of the Mongolian script. This extensive literary history has provided valuable information to linguists to study the history of the Tungusic languages, as the other languages in this family generally remain predominantly spoken, with relatively young literary histories.

So, what do these Tungusic languages have in common?

Tungusic languages typically have a system of vowel harmony, a characteristic shared with other language families in the region, most notably the Turkic and Mongolic languages. These contrasts may be done by tongue root, roundedness, or tenseness within the vowels. For languages distinguishing by vowel roundedness, words can contain either only rounded vowels or only unrounded vowels. This sort of mutually exclusive relationship is seen in words from languages with vowel harmony systems, and would affect the vowels in suffixes, prefixes, and other kinds of changes made to a given word. Vowels may also be phonemically distinguished by length, though this is generally absent in Hezhe, Manchu (Jurchen as well) and Xibe.

Additionally, the Tungusic languages also exhibit some agglutinative properties in their grammars, with some sort of case system as well. With no grammatical gender system, and a subject-object-verb canonical word order, it seems that by superficial grammatical features alone, the Tungusic languages do not really seem that much distinct from the superficial grammatical features of the Mongolic and Turkic languages. What would differ though is how the case system works for the Tungusic languages, as well as the suffixes that are used in these systems. Verb inflections for tense, mood, and aspect may also differ between the Tungusic languages and the other language families. Furthermore, the Tungusic languages may be distinguished from these language families by their lexicon for basic vocabulary like numbers. Compare these numbers from Manchu (Tungusic), Mongolian (Mongolic), and Sakha (Turkic):

Number	Manchu	Mongolian	Sakha
1	emu	neg	biir
2	juwe	khoyor	ikki
3	ilan	gurav	üs
4	duin	döröv	tüört
5	sunja	tav	bies
6	ninggun	zurgaa	alta
7	nadan	doloo	sette
8	jakūn	najm	agız
9	uyun	es	togus
10	juwan	arav	uon

Nevertheless, these superficial grammatical similarities between the three language families have led to the proposal of the controversial Altaic language family, which lumps together these language families spoken, and was extended to encompass Japanese and Korean in the lumpiest of proposals. The Altaic language family is largely disputed, though some still claim the existence of such a grouping. We might take a look in the Altaic language family debate, and the arguments for and against such a lumping some time later.

Further reading

Georg, S. (2002) ‘Unreclassifying Tungusic’, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Manchu-Tungus Studies, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 45-57.

Janhunen, J. (2023) ‘Tungusic as a Language Family’, In: The Tungusic Languages, pp. 1-18.

Oskolskaya, S., Koile, E., & Robbeets, M. (2022) ‘A Bayesian approach to the classification of Tungusic languages’, Diachronica, 39(1), pp. 128-158.

Vovin, A. (2015) ‘Eskimo Loanwords in Northern Tungusic’, Iran and the Caucasus, 19, pp. 87–95.