China News Service, Enshi, February 26 (Mu Fan, Li Zhengfei, Dong Xiaobin) "Eazika Mama." ("I am a Tujia girl" in Tujia language) February 25, in Enshi, Hubei Province, Tujia and Miao people Chu Yongming, a 69-year-old "returned teacher", is teaching Tujia language to students in a fifth-grade class at Baifusi Nationality Primary School in Laifeng County, Autonomous Prefecture.
The Tujia people are mainly distributed in the Wuling Mountains at the junction of Hunan, Hubei, Chongqing and Guizhou.
Since most of the people lived together with the Han people for a long time, the Tujia people began to use Chinese very early, and only some areas still retain the Tujia language.
In order to save and inherit the Tujia language, Chu Yongming began to collect and organize the Tujia language widely among the people since the late 1980s, and compiled a simple Tujia language textbook.
In the autumn semester of 1990, Baifusi Nationality Primary School introduced this local home language teaching material into the classroom, and carried out "bilingual" teaching for the lower grade students.
In the following 10 years, Chu Yongming and his colleagues Tan Shuchi and Peng Dazhao visited and collected a large amount of folk materials, and compiled the "National Traditional Education Reader - Tujia Language" which was synchronized with Chinese teaching.
The book consists of 12 volumes, with more than 50,000 words, covering the content of Tujia folk language and customs, traditional literature and art, etc. It is suitable for grades 1 to 6.
"After the Tujia language class entered the classroom, the endangered Tujia language has a carrier of inheritance." said Lu Jun, the principal of Baifusi National Primary School.
In 2012, the "Tujia Language Dictionary" compiled and compiled by Chu Yongming also entered the classroom for daily teaching.
"Tujia Dictionary" collects more than 10,000 Tujia words, using the international phonetic alphabet and Tujia pinyin two forms of phonetic transcription, each Tujia vocabulary is annotated with the corresponding Chinese, Southwest Mandarin, and international phonetic symbols, which is convenient for learners Check it out.
After Chu Yongming retired, Baifusi Minority Elementary School hired him back to the school to teach Tujia language classes, giving students of each grade a Tujia language class every week.
Under the advocacy of Chu Yongming, the school uses a small blackboard to display what they have learned every day, so that students can learn a simple word or a phrase and memorize the Tujia language.
Today, the senior students of Baifusi Minzu Primary School can have simple conversations in Tujia language, and even sing songs such as "Beijing's Golden Mountain".
"In the future, when they walk out of the mountains, they may forget the knowledge of Tujia language they have learned, but they will always love and identify with their own nation." Chu Yongming said.
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