Nganasan language

Nganasan
ня” njaʔ
Pronunciation	[nʲɐʔ]
Native to	Russia
Region	Taymyr Autonomous Okrug
Ethnicity	860 Nganasans (2010 census)
Native speakers	130 (2010 census)
Language family	Uralic Samoyedic Nganasan
Language codes
ISO 639-3	nio
Glottolog	ngan1291

Nganasan language (formerly called тавгийский, tavgiysky, or тавгийско-самоедский, tavgiysko-samoyedsky in Russian; from the ethnonym тавги, tavgi) is a language of the Nganasan people. In 2002 it was spoken by 500 out of 830 Nganasan people in the southwestern and central parts of the Taymyr Peninsula.

Classification

Nganasan is the most divergent language of the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family (Janhunen 1998). There are two main dialects, Avam (авамский говор, avamsky govor) and Vadeyev (вадеевский говор, vadeyevsky govor). Vocabulary can be traced elements of the unknown substrate origin.

Phonology

The language has 10 vowels and about 20 consonant phonemes.

Nganasan vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i, y	ɨ	u
Mid	e	ə	o
Open	ⁱa	ɐ	ᵘa

Several bisyllabic sequences of vowels are possible:

	-i	-y	-ɨ	-u	-ə	-ɐ
i-	ii				iə	iɐ
y-		yy			yə	yɐ
ɨ-			ɨɨ		ɨə	ɨɐ
u-	ui			uu	uə	uɐ
e-	ei	ey
ə-	əi			əu	əə
o-	oi			ou		oɐ
ⁱa-	ⁱai
ɐ-	ɐi	ɐy		ɐu		ɐɐ
ᵘa-						ᵘaɐ

One of the main features of Nganasan is the consonant gradation, which concerns the consonant phonemes /b, t, k, s (sʼ)/ and their nasal combinations /mb, nt, ŋk, ns/.

Orthography

The language's Cyrillic-based alphabet was devised in the 1990s:

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Д д	Е е	Ё ё	Ж ж
З з	З̌ з̌	И и	Й й	’’	К к	Л л	М м
Н н	Ӈ ӈ	О о	Ө ө	П п	Р р	С с	Ҫ ҫ
Т т	У у	Ү ү	Ф ф	Х х	Ц ц	Ч ч	Ш ш
Щ щ	Ъ ъ	Ы ы	Ь ь	Э э	Ә ә	Ю ю	Я я

Literature

• Wagner-Nagy, Beáta: Chrestomathia Nganasanica. (Studia Uralo-Altaica : Supplementum 10) Szeged, 2002, 306 p. ISBN 963-482-588-5
• Katzschmann, Michael: Chrestomathia Nganasanica : Texte – Übersetzung – Glossar – Grammatik, Bearbeitung der Нганасанская фольклорная хрестоматия zusammengestellt von Kazis I. Labanauskas unter Berücksichtigung des Словарь нганасанско–русский и русско–нганасанский. Norderstedt, 2008, 604 p. ISBN 978-3-8370-1121-0

External links

• Endangered Languages of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia: The Nganasan Language
• The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire: The Nganasans
• Comparative Nenets–Nganasan dictionary (with Russian and English equivalents)
• Nganasan multimedia dictionary
• German–Nganasan glossary
• Nganasanica