The Jurchen language (Chinese: 女真語; pinyin: Nǚzhēn yǔ) was the Tungusic language of the Jurchen people of eastern Manchuria, the rulers of the Jin dynasty in northern China of the 12th and 13th centuries. It is ancestral to the Manchu language. In 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchen ethnicity and language to "Manchu".

A writing system for Jurchen language was developed in 1119 by Wanyan Xiyin. A number of books were translated into Jurchen, but none have survived, even in fragments. Surviving samples of Jurchen writing are quite scarce.

One of the most important extant texts in Jurchen is the inscription on the back of "the Jin Victory Memorial Stele" (大金得勝陀頌碑; Dà jīn déshèngtuó sòngbēi), which was erected in 1185, during the reign of Emperor Shizong. It is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele.

A number of other Jurchen inscriptions exist as well. For example, in the 1950s a tablet was found in Penglai, Shandong, containing a poem in Jurchen by a poet called (in Chinese transcription) Aotun Liangbi. Although written in Jurchen, the poem was composed using the Chinese "regulated verse" format known as qiyan lüshi. It is speculated that the choice of this format—rather than something closer to the Jurchen folk poetry—was due to the influence of the Chinese literature on the educated class of the Jurchens.

The two most extensive resources on the Jurchen language available to today's linguists are two dictionaries created during the Ming Dynasty by the Chinese government's Bureau of Translators (Siyi Guan) and the Bureau of Interpreters (會同館; Huìtóng Guǎn). Both dictionaries were found as sections of the manuscripts prepared by those two agencies, whose job was to help the imperial government to communicate with foreign nations or ethnic minorities, in writing or orally, respectively.

Although the Bureau of Translators' multilingual dictionary (華夷譯語; Huá-Yí yìyǔ; 'Sino-Barbarian Dictionary') was known to Europeans since 1789 (thanks to Jean Joseph Marie Amiot), a copy of the Huá-Yí yìyǔ with a Jurchen section was not discovered until the late 19th century, when it was studied and published by Wilhelm Grube in 1896. Soon research continued in Japan and China as well. It was this dictionary which first made serious study of the Jurchen language possible. This dictionary contained translation of Chinese words into Jurchen, given in Jurchen characters and in phonetic transcription into Chinese characters (rather imprecise, since the transcription was done by means of Chinese characters).

The vocabulary lists compiled by the Bureau of Interpreters became first known to the Western scholars in 1910, and in 1912 L. Aurousseau reported the existence of a manuscript of it with a Jurchen section, supplied to him by Yang Shoujing. This dictionary is similar in its structure to the one from the Bureau of Translators, but it only gives the "phonetic" transcription of Jurchen words (by means of Chinese characters) and not their writing in Jurchen script. The time of its creation is not certain; various scholars thought that it could have been created as late as c. 1601 (by Mao Ruicheng) or as early as 1450–1500; Daniel Kane's analysis of the dictionary, published in 1989, surmises that it may have been written in the first half of the 16th century, based on the way the Jurchen words are transcribed into Chinese.

Both dictionaries record very similar forms of the language, which can be considered a late form of Jurchen, or an early form of Manchu.