| Tundra Nenets | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Northern Russia | |||
| Ethnicity | Nenets | |||
| Native speakers | 31,300 (both Tundra and Forest)[1] (date missing) | |||
| Language family | ||||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | yrk | |||
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Tundra Nenets is a Samoyedic language spoken in northern Russia, from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, by the Nenets people.[2] It is closely related to Nganasan and Enets, more distantly related to Selkup and even more distantly to the other Uralic languages. It has a sister language, the Forest Nenets language, and the two are sometimes seen as simply being dialects of a single Nenets language, and sometimes as separate languages. There is low mutual intelligibility between the two. In spite of the huge area in which Tundra Nenets is spoken, Tundra Nenets is very uniform with few dialectal differences.[3]
The language has speakers of all ages and is still passed down to children. In some western parts of where the language is spoken, however, children and young people are increasingly shifting to either Russian or Komi. Also, the traditional Nenets lands are being destroyed and as it seems like the world has turned the blind eye to these destructions, the future of the Tundra Nenets language may not be as bright as one would think.[3]
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The syllable structure of Tundra Nenets is generally CV(C), and syllables with initial, medial or final consonant clusters of more than two consonants are not allowed. Words normally do not begin with a vowel, except in western dialects of the language, mostly due to the loss of /ŋ/, so the standard Tundra Nenets word ŋarka ('big') is found as arka in western varieties.[4]
The number of vowel phonemes in Tundra Nenets is 10, which have 17 distinct allophones governed by palatality, which dominates whole sequences of vowels and consonants.[5]
Monophthong vowels are present in the chart below.
| Front | Central | Back | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unrounded | Unrounded | Unrounded | Rounded | |
| Close | i [i], [ɨ] |
u [ɯ], [u] |
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| Close-mid | e [(ʲ)eː], [ɤː] |
o [(ʲ)o̙ː], [oː] |
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| Mid | ° [ə] |
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| Open | a [(ʲ)ɑː], [ɑː] |
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Phonemes are marked in bold, with their palatal (on the left) and non-palatal (on the right) allophones marked underneath using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
/i/ and /u/ have long counterparts /iː/ and /uː/.
There is also a diphthongoid vowel <æ>, which is interchangeably realized as [æ͡e̘] or [æː].
In much of the literature on Tundra Nenets and its sister dialect, Forest Nenets, a so-called reduced vowel is mentioned. This reduced vowel was thought to have two distinct qualities depending on whether it was found in a stressed or unstressed position. In stressed position it was transcribed as <ø> and represented a reduced variant of an underlying vowel, and in unstressed position it was transcribed as <â> and represented a reduced variant of /a/. Recently, however, it has become clear that the reduced vowels are in fact short vowels, counterparts to their respective long vowels. Today <â> should simply be replaced by <a>, while <ø> simply represents a short vowel, although it is not specified which short vowel in this orthography.[6]
The number of underlying consonants in Tundra Nenets is 27.[5]
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plain | Palatalized | Plain | Palatalized | |||||
| Nasal | m | mʲ | n | ɲ | ŋ | (ʔ̃)¹ | ||
| Plosive | Voiceless | p | pʲ | t | tʲ | k | ʔ | |
| Voiced | b | bʲ | d | dʲ | ||||
| Affricate | t͡s | t͡sʲ | ||||||
| Fricative | s | sʲ | x | |||||
| Trill | r | rʲ | ||||||
| Approximant | j | w | ||||||
| Lateral | l | ʎ | ||||||
¹) The underlying phoneme nasalizable glottal stop (here denoted with a phonetically impossible nasalized glottal stop) surfaces as a plain glottal stop, or (contrary to the underlying plain glottal stop) as a nasal consonant homorganic with a following obstruent. Both kinds of underlying glottal stops may additionally be lost in the surface form.
The alphabet of Tundra Nenets is based on Cyrillic, like with most other languages found in Russia, with the addition of three letters: Ӈ ӈ, ʼ, and ˮ, which are less common among the Cyrillic letters.
Vowels' palatalized and plain allophones are distinguished in the original orthography.[5]
| phonemic transcription | a | e | o | i | u | æ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyrillic | Plain | а | э | о | ы | у | э |
| Palatalized | я | е | ё | и | ю | ||
The Cyrillic orthography doesn't distinguish the reduced vowel from /a/, nor long /iː/ and /uː/ from their short counterparts /i/ and /u/. <æ> is not found in a palatalized environment, and thus does not show up in the chart.
The schwa, /ə/, has no direct counterpart in the Cyrillic orthography, and is in most cases not written. Sometimes, however, it is written, but its presence is very irregular, as the writing system is not fully standardized. It may be seen as <а>, <я>, <ы>, <ӗ> or <ŏ>. Consider for instance the following words written with phonemic transcription and the Cyrillic orthography respectively, xad°, хад ('snowstorm') and nix°, ныхы ('power').[7]
The consonants in the Cyrillic orthography can be seen in the chart below. Note that not all the palatal consonants are included, and neither are the palatalized consonants.[8]
| phonemic transcription | /m/ | /p/ | /b/ | /w/ | /n/ | /t/ | /d/ | /ts/ | /s/ | /j/ | /l/ | /r/ | /ŋ/ | /k/ | /x/ | /ʔ/ | /h/ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyrillic | м | п | б | в | н | т | д | ц | с | й | л | р | ӈ | к | х | ˮ | ʼ |
As in Russian, the consonants are palatalized using the soft sign, <ь>, so, the palatalized consonant /mʲ/ is represented with <мь> in Cyrillic unless it is followed by a palatalizing vowel, such as <ё>, so that /mʲo/ is <мё> in Cyrillic.
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