Jurchen

Jurchen was a Tungusic language of the forests and rivers of Manchuria, and for a little over a century it was an imperial tongue. The Jurchen people founded the Jin dynasty in 1115, conquered northern China from the Khitan and the Song, and ruled it until 1234; in 1119 their first emperor commissioned a Jurchen script, so that a people newly in command of an empire would write in their own characters rather than their predecessors’. Steles went up across the north in Jurchen, the longest of them more than fifteen hundred characters.

Then the empire fell to the Mongols, and the language receded with its speakers back into the northeastern woods. Over the next three centuries it drifted, ungoverned and largely unwritten — the last dated Jurchen inscription is from 1526 — until a related people, the Manchus, rose in the same region. In 1635 the Manchu ruler Hong Taiji decreed that the old name “Jurchen” be dropped, and the language went on under a new name, as Manchu, which would conquer all of China as the Qing. Jurchen did not so much die as change its name and forget its old one. The irony is doubled: Manchu, the heir that swallowed it, now has only a few dozen fluent speakers of its own.