China: An example of Manchu calligraphic script. The main text is Manchu for 'life'.

Manchu is a Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and in 2010 there were reportedly fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus. Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian alphabet, which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uighur and Sogdian.