Spoken Sibe: Morphology of the Inflected Parts of Speech

Book excerpt: At present, the Sibe language is the only oral variety of Manchu which is actually in use. With some 20,000 to 30,000 speakers it is also the most widely spoken Tungusic language. The Sibe people, who live at the North-Western border of the present-day Sinkiang Uyghur Autonomous province of China, are descendants of the garrison men of the Manchu army from 18th century. They were sent there after the area was annexed by the Manchus with the task to guard the newly established border between the Manchu Empire and Russia. Being soldiers of an alien army they remained isolated from the indigenous Turkic and Mongolian peoples, which resulted in an allmost miraculous preservation of the language. In the 1990s, when the oral varieties of Manchu in historical Manchuria became either extinct or at the verge of extinction, Sibe kept surviving as a language spoken by all generations of Sibe people in the Chapchal Sibe autonomous county, and by the middle and older generations in virtually all other Sibe settlements of Xinjiang. By now, although the percentage of Sibe-Chinese bilingualism is high, the number of speakers, including young people, is still significantly great. The present description of the grammatical functioning of the two main inflected word classes – nouns and verbs – is documented by examples and sample texts, and provided with the basic general information about the Sibe language and its speakers. The intention of this work is to offer the reader a more complex image of the Sibe language as it is used at present on its historical and cultural territory.