Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Introducing a new blog on Manchu

For those of us in the “slightly obsessive about Beijing Dialect” category, it’s always a bit of a head-scratcher to think that Mandarin was not the exclusive language of the ruling class here during a good chunk of the last 400 years.

The Manchu, with their mǎnyǔ (满语 = Manchu language) were, of course, the folks that ruled Beijing during the majority of that time up until 1912 or so — the Qing Dynasty. And it is not a language you can really mistake for Běijīnghuà. It’s in the Tungusic family and bears a lot more similarity to agglutinative languages (read: lots of endings pasted onto words) like Korean and Japanese than to Mandarin.

Given the state of mǎnyǔ in Beijing today — virtually nonexistent — it seems reasonable to think its speakers either took a liking to Běijīnghuà or simply migrated back out to the ancestral homelands towards the northeast from which they had come. But is that really the case? And is it really possible, as some popular belief has it, that the Manchu language left virtually no trace of an influence on the local language except for a few borrowed words?

Looking back at the historical record, it seems questions like this started to come up here at Beijing Sounds when commenter Ken Grey mentioned learning Mandarin from:

… old school Beijingers. By that I mean right back to the last days of the Qing Dynasty when one could, and did hear Manchu spoken on the streets by bureaucrats and palace staff.

Wow — that means Manchu, spoken in Beijing, is pretty close to living memory if you think about it. But where did it all go?

When a couple of 东北ers (residents of China’s Northeast) and I set about trying to answer some of these questions, we thought it would end up as an occasional Manchu series on Beijing Sounds. But as the questions piled up and it became clear that the other two writer-investigators were more diligent than myself, it made sense to separate off the Manchu discussion as a blog in its own right. Thus we are proud to announce the birth of: Echoes of Manchu.

The blog aims to offer something for layfolk and academics alike: mostly Manchu language but defined in the broadest sense to include the script, the state of its education, its remaining speakers, and its influence on Mandarin. Many of these ideas, in fact, are rolled up in the first post on the language, which includes

• a road trip with Chinese characteristics (bus, anyone?)
• a Manchu-teaching elementary school
• a village elder’s performance of a Manchu ritual drum song that, had it been finished, would have called forth spirits better left undisturbed

Hope you enjoy!

[Oh, and read that post for the answer to the "Si Sain" quiz implied in the title.]