Nanai

Oroqen

Gilyak

Even

Overview
The name Tungus comes from Russian tungus, from East Turkic tunguz "wild boar".

Manchu-Tungus languages are a group of closely related languages in Siberia and the Far East. According to some researchers, they belong to the Altaic family together with the Turkic and Mongolian languages, and possibly the isolated Korean and Japanese.

The Tungus (Manchu-Tungus) branch is the smallest branch of the Altaic family with a total population of fewer than 80,000 people scattered across a vast region of central and eastern Siberia, the Russian Far East, as well as China and Mongolia.

Tungusic languages tend to have a significant number of dialects, due to the fact that the people who speak them have lived in small tribal communities or clans in relative isolation from each other. In large part due to the Soviet policy of russification and oppression of minorities, most of these languages are in various stages of endangerment.

All Tungusic languages share certain general linguistic properties.

Xibe

Sound system

The sound systems of Tungusic languages share several distinguishing characteristics:

• Vowel harmony
  It operates along the parameters of vowel rounding and vowel tenseness. For example, when a round vowel such as [o] or [u] occurs in the root, all the vowels that follow it must also be round.
• Phonemic vowel length
  This means that two otherwise identical words can have different meanings depending on whether the vowel is long or short, e.g., in Oroqen /a:kin/ "liver" with a long /a:/ and /akin/ "older sibling" with a short /a/.
• Avoidance of consonant clusters
  This means that few syllables start or end with more than one consonant.
  
  

Evenki

Negidal

Orok

Manchu

Grammar

Word structure
Tungusic languages are agglutinative, which means that each affix retains its form when added to a root or to another affix. This makes words easy to segment, since each segment carries one piece of grammatical information, unlike languages in which these segments are fused, e.g., in Russian (in transliteration) the grammatical ending -aja in krasnaja "red" stands for adjective + feminine + singular + nominative case. Here is an example from Evenki.

Noun phrase
Tungusic languages have a richly developed case system ranging from five in Manchu to thirteen in Evenki. All languages share five core case: nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, and locative. The accusative is split into definite (when a noun is specific and identifiable from context) and indefinite (when it is not specific and cannot be identified from context). The locative case (similarly to Uralic languages) can be split into several cases that specify location more precisely.

Verb phrase
Tungusic verbs are marked for tense and aspect. Depending on the language, there may be as many as seven tense markers and as many as fifteen aspect markers. The markers are strung together in a certain order. Here is an example from Oroqen:

Word order
Adjectives, numerals, and relative clauses precede the nouns they modify, and adverbs precede verbs. The usual word order is Subject - Object -Verb, although there is some variability depending on the emphasis the speaker places on a particular word in the sentence.

Evenki

Even

Writing
Tungusic languages spoken on the territory of Russia, are mostly written in Cyrillic.
Below is the text of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Even.

1. Can you recognize any words in it?

The letters of the Manchu alphabet are based on the Classical Mongolian alphabet while the phonetics are based on Jurchen, an earlier Manchu script.The Manchu alphabet was created at the end of the 16th century. It is written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and from left to right. Each letter has an initial, medial and final form. Here is a sample letter of the Manchu alphabet. Click here to learn more about Manchu.