Klavdiya Plotnikova

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova (Russian: Клавдия Захаровна Плотникова), (ca. 1895 - 1989) was the last living speaker of the Kamassian language. Her father was a Russian named Zahar Perov and her mother was a Kamassian named Afanasija, though her surname is unknown. Plotnikova and her parents are on slot 14 on a chart Finnish linguist Kai Donner has made out of Abalakovo Kamassian families.

Plotnikova did not have the opportunity to speak Kamassian after 1950, because she had no friends that could speak it. Despite that, her Kamassian skills were fairly good and she was great help to philologists for the rest of her life. Plotnikova spoke fluent Russian, which she had learned in early childhood. With the decline of her native language, Russian became her only language. This affected her Kamassian skills, especially pronunciation, vocabulary and sentence structures. The Russian influence especially showed in structure of sentences and a weakening of the vocabulary: many morphologic forms and syntactic structures fell into disuse.