Nganasan language

Nganasan
ня”
Pronunciation	[næʔ]
Spoken in	Russia
Region	Taymyr Autonomous Okrug
Ethnicity	834 Nganasans
Native speakers	505 (2002 census)
Language family	Uralic Samoyedic Nganasan
Language codes
ISO 639-3	nio
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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).

Grammar

Phonetic features of the Nganasan language include eight vowels, two so called diphthongoids (with the status of diphthongs, i.e. /ⁱa/ and /ᵘa/), probably no diphthongs (but vowelsequences), and about twenty consonant phonemes.

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	Ç ç
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

• Wagner-Nagy, Beáta: Chrestomathia Nganasanica. (Studia Uralo-Altaica : Supplementum 10) Szeged, 2002, 306 p. ISBN 963-482-588-5

• Katzschmann, Michael: Chrestomathia Nganasanica : Texte – Übersetzung – Glossar – Grammatik , Bearbeitung der Нганасанская фольклорная хрестоматия zusammengestellt von Kazis I. Labanauskas unter Berücksichtigung des Словарь нганасанско–русский и русско–нганасанский. Norderstedt, 2008, 604 p. ISBN 978-3-8370-1121-0

External links

• Ethnologue report for Nganasan
• Endangered Languages of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia: The Nganasan Language
• The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire: The Nganasans
• Comparative Nenets–Nganasan dictionary (with Russian and English equivalents)
• Nganasan multimedia dictionary
• German–Nganasan glossary
• Nganasanica