Nushu Language Dies

The death this year of 98-year-old Yang Huanyi could mean the end of one of the world’s most secretive and mysterious languages, China’s Nushu tongue.

Nushu, literally “woman’s writing,” is thought to have developed about 400 years ago as a written and spoken language in which women could communicate among themselves without men understanding them.

Women, who at the time still had their feet bound, were forbidden from any sort of formal education. It’s thought that women in the Shungjian Xu township in Jiangyong county of Hunan province developed the language, although it’s not known how much further it spread. Women in the area would give a diary to a newlywed woman with the first few pages filled with thoughts and congratulations written in Nushu, and the other pages blank for her to be able to keep a record of her own thoughts and feelings without her husband being able to understand.

Yang Huanyi was thought to be the last woman proficient in the language – written as a series of strokes, dots, horizontals and arcs – although linguists hope to preserve the language.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under On the Fringe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.