Nganasan language

Nganasan
ня” njaʔ
Pronunciation [nʲɐʔ]
Native to Russia
Region Taymyr Autonomous Okrug
Ethnicity 860 Nganasans (2010 census)[1]
Native speakers
 130 (2010 census)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 nio
Glottolog ngan1291[2]

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). In language's vocabulary can be traced elements of the unknown substrate origin.

Phonology

The Nganasan language includes 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 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

References

  1. 1 2 Nganasan at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Nganasan". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

External links

Nganasan language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator


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