The Tujia minority name themselves "bi zi ka". Down through history, the Tujia were humiliated with the name: "wuling rude people" and: Tujia rude people". These people called Tujia are a distinct group possessing their own oral language, but no written one. Their dialect belongs to the Tibetan-Burmese branch of the common language for daily use in modern Tujia society.

   The following are some example of sounds used to form some common Tujia words: hello---nicha; goodbye-qing nie yi; good evening-lan cai cha; father--- a ba; mother-a nie; husband---nuo ba; wife-luo ga ni. In this language, there are 21 initial phonetics and 25 concluding ones, utilizing four tones, its basic features may be grouped into the language is tonal; its has no double consonants, many double vowels, a huge vocabulary, many compound words, 11 categories of vocabularies Tujia language uses the sentence format, subject- predicate, and subject-object-predicate.

   In the 13th year of Emperor Yongzheng's rule during the Qing Dynasty, the governmental policy for minority region shifted from one of autonomy to centralization,. This clearly accelerated the rate of change within the Tujia language. at present, most Tujia people use Mandarin , which mainly is the southwest dialect of Mandarin. In their inhabitant area, the native Tujia language is slowly disappearing.