Manchu is a Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to classical Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus.
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Manchu is a Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to classical Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus.
Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony, and 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 alphabet (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian). Manchu, like Hindi, Russian, etc., employs grammatical gender, through the use of vowel inflections.
The Manchu language uses the Manchu script, which was derived from the traditional Mongol script,...
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