Minority Languages

China has 56 officially recognized ethnicities. All but one ethnicity (the Hui people) have their own language. What is commonly referred to as Chinese is the language of the Han people, the ethnic majority.

Ethnic minority languages are diverse and not necessarily similar to Chinese. A few of them are almost extinct (such as the Manchu language) while others are vibrant and growing. Some languages are international and are the majority language of countries bordering China while others can only be found in China. Minority languages in China cover many different language families, including two Indo-European languages (Russian and Tajik).

Tibetan

The Tibetan language is spoken by Tibetan people spread throughout the Tibetan Autonomous Region as well as Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces. There are several different dialects, though the Lhasa dialect (spoken in the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region) is the standard.

Spoken Tibetan is divided into three different categories. Everyday speech uses the vernacular form. Special occasions and polite meetings use a polite, respectful tone. A third tone is considered to be religious in nature and is similar to the way religious texts are written.

Written Tibetan uses its own script and is based on an ancient form of the Tibetan language. There are considerable differences between the written and spoken languages, but it is relatively uniform across different dialects.

Uyghur

Uyghur is spoken by the inhabitants of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where most Uyghur’s in China live. Uyghur is a Turkic language similar to many other Central Asian languages.

Uyghur can be written in Latin script, Cyrillic or Arabic script. The official language writing system is now a modified Arabic script which can be seen in signs throughout Xinjiang. Written Uyghur has a long history due to Xinjiang’s place on the Silk Road: commercial documents, laws and religious texts (mostly Muslim, Buddhist and Nestorian) were all written down in Uyghur.

Miao

The Miao people speak a language shared with other similar peoples in Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos. For centuries Miao was mistakenly classified as a Sino-Tibetan language related to Chinese since centuries of interaction meant that Miao had many loan words from Chinese dialects. It is now known that it is much more similar to Southeast Asian languages.

Miao is a tonal language, though the exact number of tones depends on the particular dialect. It had no written language in China until the beginning of the 20th century when Christian missionaries helped to develop a writing system using Latin script. This later led to the development of a unique alphabet system specially designed for the Miao.

Mongolian

Mongolian is an Altaic language spoken primarily in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Liaoning and Qinghai provinces, as well as the countries of Russia and Mongolia. Modern Mongolian is an Altaic language descended from the Middle Mongolian spoken in the Mongol Empire of the 13th – 14th centuries AD.

Mongolian has its own beautiful script that was adapted from the Uyghur script in the 13th century. Mongolians have a cosmopolitan history and their language has loan words from various other languages, including Chinese, Korean, English and many Central Asian languages.