Nanai

Nanai, called Gold in Russian accounts and Hezhen in China, is the southern Tungusic tongue of the fishing peoples of the middle and lower Amur, the Sungari and the Ussuri. The self-name Nanai means people of the land, while Hezhen began as the self-designation of the lower-Amur bands.

Early in the seventeenth century these Amur peoples resisted Nurhaci but surrendered to Hong Taiji in 1631, after which the Qing imposed the shaved forehead and queue and Manchu words and customs spread among them. French Jesuit surveyors descending the Amur in 1709 found villagers clothed in cured fish skins and called them the Fish-skin Tartars.

Nanai is agglutinative with subject-object-verb order and many dialects along the rivers. Like other Amur languages it had no script of its own in this period, being written in a Cyrillic alphabet only in later times.