Nenets language

Nenets (autonym: ненэця" 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.

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.

The syllabic structure is fairly consistent in all dialects, however. There are no long vowels or diphthongs, nor initial nor final consonant clusters, nor medial clusters containing more than two consonants.

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.

Orthography

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

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)

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