Nenets language

Nenets language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

Nenets (autonym: ненэцяʼ вада) is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia. It belongs to the Samoyedic languages which form the Uralic language family with the Finno-Ugric languages. There are two major dialects—Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets—with low mutual intelligibility between the two. Tundra Nenets has the larger group of speakers.

English words derived from Nenets

Only three Nenets words have entered the English language: Nenets itself, Nganasan - name of another people in Russia's North, and parka, their traditional long hooded jacket made from skins and sometimes fur.^[1]

Geographical distribution

Nenets is spoken by 27,273 people, of which 26,730 people are native speakers. It is spoken in the wide area in North Russia including Nenets and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Komi Republic, and the eastern parts of Murmansk Oblast on the Kola peninsula.

Phonology

Nenets has a CV(C) syllable structure. In other words, a syllable may contain an initial consonant, a medial vowel, and an optional terminal consonant. Examples include ya ("earth"), wada ("word"), and ŋarka ("big"). The schwa or reduced vowel may sometimes appear in lieu of a terminal consonant. Although the language does not technically permit syllables to begin with vowels, in practice this sometimes occurs in western dialects, particularly due to the loss of initial ŋ, e.g. western arka ("big") versus standard east-central ŋarka.

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of the Forest Nenets dialect are:^[2]

• This applies to stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables length is not contrastive, and there are only five vowel qualities /æ ɑ ə i u/. Word stress is not fixed to a certain position of a root, and this leads to alternations of stressed mid vowels with unstressed high vowels.
• Long vowels are slightly more common than short vowels.
• The short mid vowels are marginal, occurring only in a small number of monosyllabic words and commonly merged into the corresponding high vowels. This is additionally complicated by the short high vowels becoming lowered to mid height before /ə/.
• Salminen (2007) notes that due to these two facts, the long vowels should be considered basic, and the short vowels as the more marked phonemes.
• In monosyllabic words, only short vowels are however found.
• /æː/ and its unstressed counterpart may be realized as a diphthong [ae] or [aɛ]. Short /æ/ is usually [aj] (and is also written as ай, thought this spelling also represents the sequence /ɑj/), but alternates with its long counterpart in the same way as the other short vowels. /eː/ also has a diphthongal allophone [ie].

Vowels:

Some western dialects lack æ, replacing it with e.

Consonants:

The〈ʲ〉mark denotes palatalization, or a movement towards palatal articulation or secondary palatal articulation.

Phonotactics

• /æ(ː)/ only occurs in non-palatal syllables.

Orthography

Nenets is written with an adapted form of the Cyrillic alphabet, incorporating the supplemental letters Ӈ, ʼ, and ˮ.

References

1. ^ Games, Alex (2007), Balderdash & piffle : one sandwich short of a dog's dinner, London: BBC, ISBN 9781846072352 
2. ^ Salminen, Tapani (May 21, 2007), "Notes on Forest Nenets phonology", Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 253, http://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust253/sust253_salminen.pdf, retrieved 2009-01-23 

External links

• Tundra Nenets homepage
• Forest Nenets-English glossary
• Ethnologue report
• The Russian-Nenets Audio Phrasebook
• Comparative Nenets-Nganasan dictionary (with Russian and English equivalents)