Yang Huanyi, Final Speaker of a Women-Specific Language

Yang Huanyi, who died September 20 at her home in Jiangyong, China, was thought to be the last native speaker of Nushu, a language spoken only by women in a small part of Hunan province. She was in her late 90s, and had learned the language along with other girls in her neighborhood beginning at about age 10.Nushu, Mandarin for “women’s calligraphy,” was traditionally used to speak of women’s emotions, including elaborate laments at marriage, which was seen as the end of the happiest time of life.The language survives in a unique form of writing, consisting of 1,800 phonetic characters. Often, messages were composed as needlework in sanchaoshu (“third-day missives”), booklets that were given by close friends to brides. Scholars have speculated that the unique appearance of Nushu script may be related to textile design, while others have noted similarities to scratchings on ancient Chinese oracle bones.Yang learned Nushu from expert speakers: a set of seven “sworn sisters,” women who shared a special life bond that they formalized with a traditional oath. “I learned it while working alongside the older women as they cooked, cleaned, and sewed,” she told the South China Morning Post earlier this year.The upheavals of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution all helped to curtail Nushu. Traditionally, women were not educated, and Nushu developed in part as compensation. Once women started attending school, Nushu became less necessary. During the Cultural Revolution, Nushu was considered reactionary and antirevolutionary. Manuscripts were burned, and women who were caught speaking Nushu were denounced and punished.Yang herself had not spoken Nushu in four decades when scholars who had heard reports of it first approached her, in the early 1980s.Although completely illiterate in standard Chinese, Yang was able to recall enough of the language to form the basis of a dictionary and guide to the language.When authorities realized that the language might have touristic potential, they began supporting moves to preserve it. Faux-Nushu documents are already being hawked to tourists.Hunan provincial archives now contain specimens of Nushu on paper fans and manuscripts, as well as in embroidery on handkerchiefs, aprons, scarves, and handbags. Documents are rare, in part because many were traditionally destroyed at the death of the author.The oldest example of the language is, oddly, preserved on a 19th-century coin, and scholars have widely divergent estimates of the language’s age and provenence. Some claim that it stretches back to the third century C.E., when the government forbade the education of women. Another tradition holds that it was invented by a local woman who was forced to become a concubine of the emperor and needed a way to send secret messages home.While some scholars stress the harshness of women’s lives in the development of Nushu – foot-binding, having no choice about their husbands, being kept shuttered at home – others have stressed the positive side of women socializing together. The rich rice fields of Jiangyong often made it unnecessary for women to farm, and they gathered in groups to make shoes and embroidery.“Beside a well, one does not thirst. Beside a sister, one does not despair,” goes one Nushu saying. Others have a bawdier appeal. Wrote one woman to another, “At least animals go into heat in seasons. But you … .” Another common lament in marriage books: “The emperor has made the wrong rules.”In 1995, Yang was invited to attend the United Nations Fourth World Conference, in Beijing, where letters, poems, and prose that she had written were collected into a book that was published earlier this year.Until recently, Yang edified visitors by singing Nushu songs and showing them examples of Nushu script. But when a reporter from the Los Angeles Times visited her two years ago, Yang said, “Now there’s no use learning it any more.”Linguists dubbed her “living fossil of the women-specific language,” according to an obituary published by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Yang Huanyi, Final Speaker of a Women-Specific Language

Yang Huanyi, Final Speaker of a Women-Specific Language

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