Manchu (Manju gisun)

1. Introduction & endangerment status

Manchu (autonym Manju gisun) is a Tungusic language of northeast Asia and the heritage language of the Manchu people. For nearly three centuries it was anything but obscure: it was the court and administrative language of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912), the empire that ruled China and inner Asia. Millions of pages of Qing memorials, treaties, dictionaries and translations survive in Manchu, making it one of the best-documented languages on this list — and a key that historians still use to read the Qing archive.¹

Today the spoken language has all but collapsed. UNESCO classes Manchu as critically endangered: of nearly ten million ethnic Manchus, fewer than one hundred people speak it fluently, almost all elderly. The last strongholds of native speech are a few villages in Heilongjiang — above all Sanjiazi, where only around nine mother-tongue speakers remained as of recent fieldwork.²³

There is, however, a living lifeline. Xibe (Sibe), spoken by tens of thousands of people in the Ili valley of Xinjiang, is so close to Manchu that it is often treated as a modern dialect of it. Xibe is still written, taught and printed, which means the Manchu script and much of its grammar remain in daily use even as classical Manchu itself fades. This guide teaches written ('literary') Manchu, the form preserved in the Qing record and shared in large part with Xibe.

This guide is organised into the eight CEFR sub-levels below, from absolute first contact (A1.1) to extended texts and the historical archive (B2.2). Each band carries a visible heading so you always know where you are.

Manchu is written in the vertical Manchu alphabet, adapted from the Mongolian script (itself descended from the Old Uyghur and ultimately Aramaic tradition). It is written top-to-bottom in columns that run left-to-right across the page. In the 1630s the scholar Dahai reformed the older Mongolian-style letters by adding diacritic dots and circles (tongki fuka) so that each sound was written unambiguously — an early, deliberate spelling reform.⁴

Because the vertical script is hard to typeset inline, learners and scholars use a Latin romanization. The standard system, devised by Paul Georg von Möllendorff in 1892, is used throughout this guide. Once you can read the romanization, the script itself becomes a matter of letter-shapes.

Manchu sounds are approachable for English speakers: a five-vowel system (a, e/ə, i, o, u) plus ū (a back vowel) and a consonant set close to English, with a few back consonants (k/g/h have 'deep' uvular partners before back vowels). Stress is light. Vowel harmony governs which vowels co-occur in a word — a hallmark of the wider Altaic-type languages.

Classical Manchu was a written language and did not use casual 'hello/goodbye' formulas the way English does; spoken Sanjiazi Manchu and modern teaching materials, however, give everyday greetings. A few high-frequency items will get you started.⁵

Notice that 'hello' is built from sain ('good') plus the question particle nio — Manchu marks yes/no questions with a sentence-final particle rather than word order. You will meet that particle again at A2.2.

Manchu personal pronouns distinguish an inclusive 'we' (you and I) from an exclusive 'we' (we, not you) — a distinction English lacks.

Counting 1–10

Higher numbers are transparent: orin (20), gūsin (30), tanggū (100), minggan (1,000). Teens combine ten + unit, e.g. juwan emu (11).

A handful of everyday nouns: niyalma (person), boo (house), morin (horse), inenggi (day), bithe (book/document), ama (father), eme (mother). Manchu has no grammatical gender and no articles.

Manchu is a head-final, agglutinative, SOV language: the verb comes last, modifiers precede their heads, and grammatical relations are shown by suffixes and postpositions rather than prepositions. Each suffix tends to carry exactly one meaning, which makes the system regular once learned.¹

A basic statement: bi bithe hūlambi — literally 'I book read' = 'I am reading a book' (bi = I, bithe = book, hūlambi = read, present/imperfect).

To make a yes/no question, add the particle -o/-nio at the end instead of changing word order: si sain nio? = 'are you well?'. To negate, Manchu uses the negative word akū ('there is not / not') or special negative verb forms, placed after the element negated.

Postpositions, not prepositions

Where English says 'in the house', Manchu says boo de — house + the locative postposition de ('in/at/to'). Common case-like suffixes/postpositions include i (genitive, 'of'), be (accusative, marks the definite object), de (dative/locative), and ci (ablative, 'from').

Manchu nouns take a small, regular set of case markers that attach to the end of the noun phrase. Because they are particles rather than fused endings, they are easy to recognise.

Possession is shown with the genitive i: Manju i gisun = 'the speech of the Manchu' = the Manchu language. The order is possessor + i + possessed, mirroring the head-final pattern.

The Manchu verb is built from a stem plus tense/aspect suffixes. Core finite forms include the imperfect/present -mbi, the perfect -ha/-he/-ho (harmonising with the stem vowel), and the future/intentional -ki. The verb 'to do/make' is ara-; 'to come' is ji-; 'to go' is gene-.

Manchu is famous for its converbs — non-finite verb forms that chain clauses together, such as -fi ('having done…, and then') and -me ('while doing…'). A sentence can string several converbs before a single final verb: jifi, bithe be gaifi, hūlambi = 'having come, having taken the book, (he) reads'. Mastering converbs is the real gateway to reading Manchu prose.

At this level the goal is to read connected text. Literary Manchu favours long converb chains, heavy use of the object marker be for definite objects, and postpositional phrases that stack before the verb. Honorific and register distinctions matter in Qing documents: memorials to the throne use elevated vocabulary and fixed formulae.

Manchu absorbed a large Chinese-derived vocabulary for administration and Buddhism, alongside native Tungusic core vocabulary. Recognising which layer a word belongs to helps in parsing official texts versus folk narrative and shamanic song, the latter preserving older native forms.

Xibe, the living relative, has innovated in pronunciation and borrowed from Chinese, Uyghur and Russian, but its grammar remains close enough that Xibe newspapers and schoolbooks are an unmatched source of natural, modern sentences for the Manchu learner.

The reward for reaching B2.2 is the archive itself. The Qing produced Manchu translations of the Confucian classics and Chinese histories, the vast Manwen Laodang ('Old Manchu Archive'), bilingual and pentaglot dictionaries (Manchu–Chinese–Mongolian–Tibetan–Uyghur), and original Manchu memorials, edicts and shamanic texts. For the patient reader, Manchu opens a door onto the inner workings of an empire.

Continuing study means three things: drilling the script until the vertical letters are automatic; reading graded Xibe material for living usage; and working through an annotated Qing text with a grammar and dictionary at hand. The standard reference grammar in English is Liliya Gorelova's Manchu Grammar (Brill, 2002); Jerry Norman's A Comprehensive Manchu–English Dictionary (Harvard, 2013) is the dictionary of record.¹

Learning resources

• Manchu language — overview, script and grammar (Wikipedia)Reference — typology, script history, status
• A Manchu Grammar (von Möllendorff, 1892) — full textA2–B2 — the classic romanized grammar, free
• Manchu phrasebook (Wikivoyage)A1–A2 — greetings & everyday phrases
• “Manchu, Once China’s Official Language, Could Lose Its Voice” (Sixth Tone)Background — Sanjiazi & the last speakers