The Tungusic languages/tʊŋˈɡʊsɪk/ (also known as Manchu–Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and ManchuriabyTungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus").
Linguists working on Tungusic have proposed a number of different classifications based on different criteria, including morphological, lexical, and phonological characteristics. Some scholars have criticized the tree-based model of Tungusic classification and argue that the long history of contact among the Tungusic languages makes them better treated as a dialect continuum.[1]
Current geographic distribution of languages in the Tungusic family.
The main classification is into a northern branch and a southern branch (Georg 2004) although the two branches have no clear division, and the classification of intermediate groups is debatable.
Alexander Vovin[3] notes that Manchu and Jurchen are aberrant languages within South Tungusic but nevertheless still belong in it, and that this aberrancy is perhaps due to influences from the Para-Mongolic Khitan language, from Old Korean, and perhaps also from Chukotko-Kamchatkan and unknown languages of uncertain linguistic affiliation.
Some linguists estimate the divergence of the Tungusic languages from a common ancestor spoken somewhere in Eastern Manchuria around 500 BC to 500 AD. (Janhunen 2012, Pevnov 2012)[6] Other theories favor a homeland closer to Lake Baikal. (Menges 1968, Khelimskii 1985)[7] While the general form of the protolanguage is clear from the similarities in the daughter languages, there is no consensus on detailed reconstructions. As of 2012, scholars are still trying to establish a shared vocabulary to do such a reconstruction.[6] The Lake Khanka region was found to present the most likely homeland, based on linguistic and ancient genetic data.[8]
There are some proposed sound correspondences for Tungusic languages. For example, Norman (1977) supports a Proto-Tungusic *t > Manchu s when followed by *j in the same stem, with any exceptions arising from loanwords.[9] Some linguists believe there are connections between the vowel harmony of Proto-Tungusic and some of the neighboring non-Tungusic languages. For example, there are proposals for an areal or genetic correspondence between the vowel harmonies of Proto-Korean, Proto-Mongolian, and Proto-Tungusic based on an original RTR harmony.[10] This is one of several competing proposals, and on the other hand, some reconstruct Proto-Tungusic without RTR harmony.[10]
Some sources describe the Donghu people of 7th century BC to 2nd century BC Manchuria as Proto-Tungusic.[11] Other sources sharply criticize this as a random similarity in pronunciation with "Tungus" that has no real basis in fact.[12]
The historical records of the Korean kingdoms of Baekje and Silla note battles with the Mohe (Chinese: 靺鞨) in Manchuria during the 1st and 2nd centuries. Some scholars suggest these Mohe are closely connected to the later Jurchens, but this is controversial.
Alexander Vovin (2015)[13] notes that Northern Tungusic languages have Eskimo–Aleut loanwords that are not found in Southern Tungusic, implying that Eskimo–Aleut was once much more widely spoken in eastern Siberia. Vovin (2015) estimates that the Eskimo–Aleut loanwords in Northern Tungusic had been borrowed no more than 2,000 years ago, which was when Tungusic was spreading northwards from its homeland in the middle reaches of the Amur River.
Liu et al. (2020) [15] revealed that Haplogroup C-F5484 and its subclades are the genetic markers of Tungusic-speaking peoples. C-F5484 emerged 3,300 years ago and began to diverge 1,900 years ago, indicating the approximate age of differentiation of Tungusic languages.[citation needed]
The earliest written attestation of the language family is in the Jurchen language, which was spoken by the rulers of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234).[16] The Jurchens invented a Jurchen script to write their language based on the Khitan scripts. During this time, several stelae were put up in Manchuria and Korea. One of these, among the most important extant texts in Jurchen, is the inscription on the back of "the Jin Victory Memorial Stele" (Da Jin deshengtuo songbei), which was erected in 1185, during the Dading period (1161–1189). It is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele.[17] The last known example of the Jurchen script was written in 1526.
The Tungusic languages appear in the historical record again after the unification of the Jurchen tribes under Nurhaci, who ruled 1616–1626. He commissioned a new Manchu alphabet based on the Mongolian alphabet, and his successors went on to found the Qing dynasty. In 1636, Emperor Hong Taiji decreed that the ethnonym "Manchu" would replace "Jurchen". Modern scholarship usually treats Jurchen and Manchu as different stages of the same language.
Currently, Manchu proper is a dying language spoken by a dozen or so elderly people in Qiqihar, China. However, the closely related Xibe language spoken in Xinjiang, which historically was treated as a divergent dialect of Jurchen-Manchu, maintains the literary tradition of the script, and has around 30,000 speakers. As the only language in the Tungusic family with a long written tradition, Jurchen-Manchu is a very important language for the reconstruction of Proto-Tungusic.
Other Tungusic languages have relatively short or no written traditions. Since around the 20th century, some of these other languages can be written in a Russian-based Cyrillic script, but the languages remain primarily spoken languages only.[citation needed]
The earliest Western accounts of Tungusic languages came from the Dutch traveler Nicolaes Witsen, who published in the Dutch language a book, Noord en Oost Tartarye (literally 'North and East Tartary'). It described a variety of peoples in the Russian Far East and included some brief word lists for many languages. After his travel to Russia, his collected findings were published in three editions, 1692, 1705, and 1785.[18] The book includes some words and sentences from the Evenki language, then called "Tungus".
The German linguist Wilhelm Grube (1855–1908) published an early dictionary of the Nanai language (Gold language) in 1900, as well as deciphering the Jurchen language for modern audiences using a Chinese source.
The Tungusic languages are of an agglutinative morphological type, and some of them have complex case systems and elaborate patterns of tense and aspect marking. However, none of the languages have grammatical gender or noun classes. All Tungusic languages have postpositions. Counting is done in base ten, and the names of the cardinal numbers from 1 to 10 are cognates in most cases.[19]
Tungusic languages exhibit a complex pattern of vowel harmony, based on two parameters: vowel roundedness and vowel tenseness (in Evenki, the contrast is back and front). Tense and lax vowels do not occur in the same word; all vowels in a word, including suffixes, are either one or the other. Rounded vowels in the root of a word cause all the following vowels in the word to become rounded, but not those before the rounded vowel. Those rules are not absolute, and there are many individual exceptions.[20]
Vowel length is phonemic in most languages, with many words distinguished based on the distinction between short vowel and long vowel.[20] Languages without long vowels consist of the Jurchenic languages (Jurchen, Manchu, Xibe) and the Hezhe language. Diphthongs also occur in all languages.[19]
Tungusic words have simple word codas, and usually have simple word onsets, with consonant clusters forbidden at the end of words and rare at the beginning.[20]
Below are Proto-Tungusic consonants as reconstructed by Tsintsius (1949) and the vowels according to Benzing (1955):[21]
Tungusic is today considered a primary language family. Especially in the past, some linguists have linked Tungusic with Turkic and Mongolic languages, among various others, in the Altaic language familyorTranseurasian family.[22] However, the proposal of a genetic, as opposed to an areal, link remains highly controversial.[23][24]
The language of the Avars in Europe which created the Avar Khaganate is believed by some scholars to be of Tungusic origin.[25]
^Lindsay J. Whaley, Lenore A. Grenoble and Fengxiang Li (June 1999). "Revisiting Tungusic Classification from the Bottom up: A Comparison of Evenki and Oroqen". Language. 75 (2): 286–321. doi:10.2307/417262. JSTOR417262.
^Hölzl, Andreas. 2018. The Tungusic language family through the ages: Interdisciplinary perspectives: Introduction. International Workshop at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE). 29 August – 1st September 2018, Tallinn University, Estonia.
^Lindsay J. Whaley (18 June 2007). "Manchu-Tungus languages". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 25 November 2016.
^Tillman, Hoyt Cleveland, and Stephen H. West. China Under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 228–229. ISBN0-7914-2274-7. Partial text on Google Books.
^J. Benzing, "Die tungusischen Sprachen: Versuch einer vergleichenden Grammatik", Abhandlungen der Geistes und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse,vol. 11 (1955), pp. 949–1099.
^Georg, Stefan (2023). "Connections between Uralic and Other Language Families". In Daniel Abondolo; Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi (eds.). The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 176–209. doi:10.4324/9781315625096-4. ISBN9781315625096.
^Helimski, E (2004). "Die Sprache(n) der Awaren: Die mandschu-tungusische Alternative". Proceedings of the First International Conference on Manchu-Tungus Studies, Vol. II: 59–72.
Kane, Daniel. The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters. Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series, Volume 153. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1989. ISBN0-933070-23-3.
Miller, Roy Andrew. Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1971.
Poppe, Nicholas. Vergleichende Grammatik der Altaischen Sprachen [A Comparative Grammar of the Altaic Languages]. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1960.
Tsintsius, Vera I. Sravnitel'naya Fonetika Tunguso-Man'chzhurskikh Yazïkov [Comparative Phonetics of the Manchu-Tungus Languages]. Leningrad, 1949.
Stefan Georg. "Unreclassifying Tungusic", in: Carsten Naeher (ed.): Proceedings of the First International Conference on Manchu-Tungus Studies (Bonn, August 28 – September 1, 2000), Volume 2: Trends in Tungusic and Siberian Linguistics, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 45–57.
Hölzl, Andreas & Payne, Thomas E. (eds.). 2022. Tungusic languages: Past and present. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 32). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7025328 https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/355 Open Access.
Alonso de la Fuente, José Andrés. 2017b. From converb to classifier? On the etymology of Literary Manchu nofi. In Michał Né meth, Barbara Podolak & Mateusz Urban (eds.), Essays in the history of languages and linguistics. Dedicated to Marek Stachowski on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 57–80. Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka.
Alonso de la Fuente, José Andrés. 2018. Past tenses, diminutives and expressive palatalization: Typology and the limits of internal reconstruction in Tungusic. In Bela Kempf, Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky & Christopher P. Atwood (eds.), Philology of the Grasslands: Essays in Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic Studies, 112–137. Leiden: Brill.
Aralova, Natalia. 2015. Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception. Utrecht: LOT.
Baek, Sangyub. 2016. Tungusic from the perspective of areal linguistics: Focusing on the Bikin dialect of Udihe. Sapporo:Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaidō University. (Doctoral dissertation.)
Baek, Sangyub. 2017. Grammatical peculiarities of Oroqen Evenki from the perspective of genetic and areal linguistics. Linguistic Typology of the North, vol. 4. 13–32.
Baek, Sangyub . 2018. Chiiki gengo-gaku-teki kanten kara mita tsungūsu shogo no hojo dōshi . Hoppō gengo kenkyū 8. 59–79.
Bogunov, Y. V., O. V. Maltseva, A. A. Bogunova & E. V. Balanovskaya 2015. The Nanai clan Samar: The structure of gene pool based on Y-chromosome markers. Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 43(2). 146–152.
Bulatova, Nadezhda. 2014. Phonetic correspondences in the languages of the Ewenki of Russia and China. Altai Hakpo 24. 23–38.
Chaoke D. O. 2014a. Man tonggusiyuzu yuyan cihui bijiao . Peking: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2014a. Man tonggusiyuzu yuyan ciyuan yanjiu . Peking: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2014c. Xiboyu 366 ju huihuaju. Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2014d. Manyu 366 ju huihuaju. Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2016a. Ewenke yu jiaocheng . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2016b. Suolun ewenke yu jiben cihui . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. 2017. Ewenke zu san da fangyan cihui bijiao . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Kajia 2016a. Suolun ewenke yu huihua . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Kajia 2016b. Tonggusi ewenke yu huihua . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Kajia . 2017. Nehe ewenke yu jiben cihui . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Kalina . 2016. Ewenkezu yanyu . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Kalina . 2017. Arong ewenke yu . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Sirenbatu . 2016. Aoluguya ewenke yu huihua . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Chaoke D. O. & Wang Lizhen . 2016. Ewenkezu minge geci . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Corff, Oliver et al. 2013. Auf kaiserlichen Befehl erstelltes Wörterbuch des Manjurischen in fünf Sprachen: „Fünfsprachenspiegel“. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Crossley, Pamela K. 2015. Questions about ni- and nikan. Central Asiatic Journal 58(1–2). 49–57.
Do, Jeong-up. 2015. A comparative study of Manchu sentences in Manwen Laodang and Manzhou Shilu. Altai Hakpo 25. 1–35.
Doerfer, Gerhard & Michael Knüppel. 2013. Armanisches Wörterbuch. Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz.
Duggan, Ana T. 2013. Investigating the prehistory of Tungusic peoples of Siberia and the Amur-Ussuri region with complete mtDNA genome sequences and Y-chromosomal markers. PlosOne 8(12). e83570.
Duo Limei & Chaoke D. O. 2016. Tonggusi ewenke yu yanjiu . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Grenoble, Lenore A. 2013. The syntax and pragmatics of Tungusic revisited. In Balthasar Bickel, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson and Alan Timberlake (eds.), Language typology and historical contingency. In honor of Johanna Nichols, 357–382. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Grenoble, Lenore A. 2014. Spatial semantics, case and relator nouns in Evenki. In Pirkko Suihkonen & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.), On diversity and complexity of languages spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia,111–131. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gusev, Valentin. 2016. Figura etymologica in Uilta. Hoppō jinbun kenkyū 9. 59–74.
Hölzl, Andreas. 2018a. Constructionalization areas: The case of negation in Manchu. In Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson & Joel Olofsson (eds.), Grammaticalization meets construction grammar (Constructional Approaches to Language 21), 241–276. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hölzl, Andreas. 2018b. Udi, Udihe, and the language(s) of the Kyakala. IJDL – International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction 15. 111–146.
Hölzl, Andreas. 2018c. Das Mandschurische: Ein diachroner Überblick. Asien-Orient Institut, Universität Zürich, 16.03.2018.
Jang Taeho & Tom Payne. 2018. The modern spoken Xibe verb system. IJDL – International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction 15. 147–169.
Jang, Taeho, Kyungsook Lim Jang & Thomas E. Payne. forthcoming A typological grammar of Xibe.
Janhunen, Juha. 2005. Tungusic. An endangered language family in Northeast Asia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 173. 37–54.
Janhunen, Juha. 2015. Recent advances in Tungusic lexicography. Studia Orientalia Electronica 3. 17–20.
Janhunen, Juha 2016. Reconstructio externa linguae ghiliacorum. Studia Orientalia 117. 3–27.
Kane, Daniel. 2013. Introduction, Part 2: An update on deciphering the Kitan language and scripts. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43. 11–25.
Kang, Hijo, Jiwon Yun & Seongyeon Ko. 2017. Vowels of Beryozovka Ewen: An acoustic phonetic study. Altai Hakpo 27. 1–23.
Kazama Shinjirō , . 2015a. Dagūru-go no goi ni okeru tsungūsu shogo to no kyōtsū yōso ni tsuite . Hoppō jinbun kenkyū 8. 1–23.
Kazama Shinjirō , . 2015b. Euen-go buisutoraya hōgen no gaisetsu to tekisuto . Hoppō gengo kenkyū 5. 83–128.
Khabtagaeva, Bayarma. 2017. The Ewenki dialects of Buryatia and their relationship to Khamnigan Mongol. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Khabtagaeva, Bayarma. 2018. The role of Ewenki VgV in Mongolic Reconstructions. In Bela Kempf, Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky & Christopher P. Atwood (eds.), Philology of the Grasslands: Essays in Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic Studies, 174–193. Leiden: Brill.
Kim, Alexander. 2013. Osteological studies of archaeological materials from Jurchen sites in Russia. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43. 335- 347.
Ko, Seongyeon, Andrew Joseph & John Whitman. 2014. In Martine Robbeets and Walter Bisang (eds.), Paradigm change: In the Transeurasian languages and beyond, 141–176. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Kuzmin, Yaroslav V. et al. 2012. The earliest surviving textiles in East Asia from Chertovy Vorota Cave, Primorye Province, Russian Far East 86(332). 325–337.
Li Linjing . 2016. Hojengo no kaiwa tekisuto (6) (6). Hoppō gengo kenkyū 6. 131–152.
Norman, Jerry. 2013. A comprehensive Manchu-English dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2014. Paradigm copying in Tungusic: The Lamunkhin dialect of Ėven and beyond. In Martine Robbeets & Walter Bisang (eds), Paradigm Change: In the Transeurasian languages and beyond, 287–310. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pakendorf, Brigitte & Ija V. Krivoshapkina. 2014. Ėven nominal evaluatives and the marking of definiteness. Linguistic Typology 18(2). 289–331.
Pakendorf, Brigitte & R. Kuz'mina. 2016. Evenskij jazyk. In V. Mixal'čenko (ed.), Jazyk i obščestvo. Enciklopedija, 583–587. Azbukovnik: Izdatel'skij Centr.
Róna-Tas, András 2016. Khitan studies I: The graphs of the Khitan small script. 1 General remarks, dotted graphs, numerals. Acta Orientalia Hungarica 69 (2): 117‒138.
Sebillaud, Pauline & Liu Xiaoxi. 2016. Une ville jurchen au temps des Ming (XIV e -XVII e siècle): Huifacheng, un carrefour économique et culturel. Arts Asiatiques 71. 55–76.
Shimunek, Andrew. 2016. Yöröö Khamnigan: A possibly recently extinct Tungusic language of northern Mongolia. Altai Hakpo 26. 13–28.
Shimunek, Andrew. 2017. Languages of ancient southern Mongolia and North China. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Shimunek, Andrew. 2018. Early Serbi-Mongolic–Tungusic Lexical Contact: Jurchen Numerals from the Shirwi (Shih-wei) in North China. In Bela Kempf, Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky & Christopher P. Atwood (eds.), Philology of the Grasslands: Essays in Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic Studies, 331–346. Leiden: Brill.
Siska, Veronika et al. 2017. Genome-wide data from two early Neolithic East Asian individuals dating to 7700 years ago. Science Advances 3: e1601877.
Stary, Giovanni. 2015. Manchu-Chinese bilingual compositions and their verse-technique. Central Asiatic Journal 58(1–2). 1–5.
Stary, Giovanni. 2017. Neue Beiträge zum Sibe-Wortschatz. In Michał Németh, Barbara Podolak & Mateusz Urban (eds.), Essays in the history of languages and linguistics. Dedicated to Marek Stachowski on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 703–707. Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka.
Sun Hao. 2014. A re-examination of the Jurchen Sanshi-bu ("thirty surnames"). Eurasian Studies 2. 84–121.
Tabarev, Andrei V. 2014. The later prehistory of the Russian Far East. In Colin Renfrew & Paul Bahn (eds.), The Cambridge world prehistory, 3 vols., 852–869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tolskaya, Inna. 2014. Oroch vowel harmony. Lingua 138. 128–151.
Tolskaya, Maria. 2015. Udihe. In Nicola Grandi & Lívia Körtvélyessy (eds.), Edinburgh handbook of evaluative morphology, 333– 340. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Trachsel, Yves. 2018. Archery in primers. Debtelin 2 109–115.
Tsumagari, Toshiro. 2014. Remarks on the Uilta folktale text collected by B. Pilsudski. Hoppō jinbun kenkyū 7. 83- 94.
Vovin, Alexander. 2012. Did Wanyan Xiyin invent the Jurchen script? In Andrej Malchukov & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.), Recent advances in Tungusic linguistics, 49–58. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Vovin, Alexander. 2013. From Koguryŏ to T’amna. Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean. Korean Linguistics 15(2). 222–240.
Vovin, Alexander. 2015a. Eskimo loanwords in northern Tungusic. Iran and the Caucasus 19. 87–95.
Vovin, Alexander. 2015b. Some notes on the Tuyuhun () language: In the footsteps of Paul Pelliot. Journal of Sino-Western Communications 7(2). 157‒166.
Vovin, Alexander. 2018. Four Tungusic etymologies. In Bela Kempf, Ákos Bertalan Apatóczky & Christopher P. Atwood (eds.), Philology of the Grasslands: Essays in Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic Studies, 366–368. Leiden: Brill.
Walravens, Hartmut. 2017. A note on digitised Manchu texts. Central Asiatic Journal 60(1–2. 341–344.
Wang Qingfeng . 2005. Manyu yanjiu . Peking: Minzu chubanshe.
Weng Jianmin & Chaoke D. O. 2016. Aoluguya ewenke yu yanjiu . Peking: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe.
Yamada Yoshiko, . 2015. Uirutago kita hōgen tekisuto: Hito kui obake no hanashi . Hoppō gengo kenkyū 5. 261–280.
Yamada Yoshiko, . 2016. Gishikutauda (marīya miheewa) no shōgai: Uiruta-go kita hōgen tekisuto : . Hoppō gengo kenkyū 6. 179–201.
Yamada Yoshiko, . 2017. Uiruta-go kita hōgen no on'in-teki keitai-teki tokuchō: Minami hōgen to no sōi-ten o chūshin ni : . Hoppō gengo kenkyū 10. 51–70.
Zhang Paiyu. 2013. The Kilen language of Manchuria. Grammar of a moribund Tungusic language. Hong Kong: Hongkong University Press. (Doctoral dissertation.)
