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Overseas students at Tibet University study the local language in the autonomous region. Yang Shizhong / China Daily
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The Tujia aren't the only Chinese ethnicity whose language faces extinction. Nearly all 55 non-Han groups' more than 130 languages face the same problem. (Ethnic Han account for more than 90 percent of the country's people.)
The risks are most accelerated for groups with smaller populations.
But governments, scholars and educated ethnic people are working harder than ever to preserve these languages, mostly by creating some of their first dictionaries.
While Tibetans, Mongolians and Uygurs have their own scripts, most of China's ethnicities only have spoken forms, including groups with millions of members like the Miao and Tujia.
Their words are codified using the International Phonetic Alphabet for tones and Chinese pinyin for spellings.
The country has been compiling ethnic languages since the 1950s. But investments have increased in recent years, resulting in newfound enthusiasm among scholars and local governments.
Linguist Sun Hongkai, who has been involved in compiling more than 20 ethnic-language dictionaries, says: "A good dictionary requires several million yuan and many years. Many scholars and educated ethnic people are more than willing to do the work."
The 80-year-old has received many invitations by ethnic areas' local governments in recent years. Most want Sun to lead their dictionaries' compilation.
"They're increasingly aware of their identities," Sun says.
"They worry their unique cultures will be forgotten once their languages are."
Ethnic Miao Long Shengguang spent 14 years compiling his Miao-Han Dictionary that was published last year.
The 59-year-old Luquan Yi and Miao autonomous prefecture native says his sense of identity motivated him to undertake the project to preserve his ethnicity's language and culture.
It usually takes more than a decade for an individual or a team to create a dictionary of more than 10,000 words.
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