Repairman live-streams Manchu lessons to protect minority languages

Baturu, a repairman of the Manchu ethnic group from Liaoyang city, Northeast China's Liaoning province has been live-streaming Manchu language lessons since 2017 via the live-streaming platforms to raise awareness for the endangered minority languages, reports Beijing Youth Daily.

Batulu lives in a Manchu village, where no one else in the 800-people-village is capable of speaking the Manchu language. To save the language from extinction, he learned the written and spoken Manchu language by himself.

To tell more people, including the Manchu people about the Manchu language, he started teaching the Manchu on the live-streaming platform kuaishou.com. His lessons contains the phonetic symbols, grammars, commonly used word like "mother" and "uncle" in Manchu, and some folk customs of the Manchu people.

Sometimes, Batulu's live streaming can last until midnight. "As long as there are people watching, I could keep teaching", said Batulu. At the moment, almost 100 people are studying the Manchu language with him.

In fact, many minority languages are bordering on the edge of distinction. Fortunately, some people have realized and started protecting them, and many short-video live-streaming platforms are willing to facilitate these lessons.