Taz
Тазы хуаюй Tazi huayüTazi huayuy 塔兹话语
Native to	Russia
Region	Russian Far East
Ethnicity	274Taz people[1] (2010 census)[2]
Native speakers	<10 (2019–2024)[3]
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin Northeastern Taz
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None
Taz

Taz is a dialect ofNortheastern Mandarin spoken by theTaz people of theRussian Far East.^[4] There are a few loanwords fromTungusic languages, but no obvious Tungusic effect on the grammar.^[5]

Taz is largely mutually intelligible with Mandarin. In 1992, some Chinese bought ginseng from the Taz. They spoke Standard Chinese and Taz, respectively, and could understand one other. What they did not understand were mainly place names and social terms.^[5]

The Taz are descendants of the intermarriage ofHan Chinese immigrants and localTungusic peoples. In the early to middle 19th century, Han Chinese from Northeast China moved to theUssuri River basin and engaged inginseng harvesting, fishing and hunting. The immigrants were mostly men, and they married the localUdege andNanai peoples. Their language, while remaining completely Chinese grammatically, adopted some loan words fromNanai andUdege.^[4] There is a 400-word dictionary, but the language otherwise has no writing system and is a purely oral language.^[6] In 1880, the language was used by a thousand people. By the beginning of the 21st century, only a few elderly people still spoke it. The 2002 All-Russian Census recorded that all Taz people regarded Russian as their mother tongue. The 2010 census found 274 Taz people but no Taz speakers,^[2] so the Taz language is likely to be extinct.

Taz is a typical Northeastern Mandarin dialect. There is noretroflex series, but there iserhua. Words with anr initial ofStandard Chinese (MSC) have an initialy in Taz, and some words with an initialf in MSC have an initialh in Taz. The MSC finals-ai and-ou are pronounced-ei and-u in Taz, whereas nasal finals are mostly realized asnasal vowels. Taz has the four lexical tones and theneutral tone of MSC and Northeast Mandarin. Theyin ping tone (tone 1) is lower than in MSC, andyang ping (tone 2) 为降升调.^{[clarification needed]} The distinction betweenyang ping andshang tone (tone 3) is not obvious. The pitch drops at the end of a sentence, and can sound like ashang orqu tone.^[5]

The vocabulary is typical of Northeastern Mandarin, with such characteristic words as俺們 for 'we', дэй3фань4dei3fan4 for 'food' and日頭 for 'sun'. There are a few loanwords from Tungusic languages, such as аракиar'aki 'wine', яцзигаyajiga 'daughter' (Udegeajiga), etc. Исимаyixima 'rainbow trout' may be from Oroch.^[5]

Listed below are some Taz sentences.^[5] They are transcribed in standard RussianCyrillicized Chinese.

• Languages of Russia
• Mandarin Chinese

• CS1 uses Russian-language script (ru)
• CS1 Russian-language sources (ru)
• CS1 uses Japanese-language script (ja)
• CS1 Japanese-language sources (ja)
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• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles containing Mandarin Chinese-language text
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• Dialects of languages with ISO 639-3 code
• Wikipedia articles needing clarification from November 2024