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‘This job is urgent’: Chinese team hopes AI can save Manchu language from extinction
- Researchers in northeast China are developing technology to recognise and speak the language of Qing dynasty rulers
- Fewer than 100 people – all of them elderly residents of remote villages – are fluent in Manchu today
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Stephen Chenin Beijing
A research team in northeastern China say they are using artificial intelligence to save the language of the Manchu people, an ethnic minority group that ruled China for more than 200 years until the early 20th century.
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Manchu, the official language of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), has its own alphabet and is fundamentally different from Chinese, which is written using tens of thousands of characters. The Manchu script can be found all over the Forbidden City in Beijing, where it is inscribed on the plaques that hang from the buildings of the former imperial palace.
But fewer than 100 people – all of them elderly residents of remote villages – can speak and write Manchu with native fluency today, according to government data.
Researcher Wang Di and her colleagues at the Academy of Social Sciences of Heilongjiang in the northeastern city of Harbin are training an AI to recognise and speak the language.
The AI could help preserve the Manchu language and culture for future generations, even after the last native speakers die, Wang said in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal The Border Economy and Culture on November 7.
“This job is urgent,” she said.
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The AI’s training materials mainly consist of voice recordings Wang’s team and other linguists collected from the last few Manchu speakers in Heilongjiang province.
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