Forest Nenets language
| Forest Nenets | |
|---|---|
| ненэцяʼ вада, nenəc̦a’ wada | |
| Native to | Northern Russia |
| Ethnicity | Nenets |
|
Native speakers
|
(1,500 cited 1989) (5% of Nenets speakers) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | fore1266 |
Forest Nenets is a Samoyedic language spoken in northern Russia, around the Agan, Pur, Lyamin and Nadym rivers, by the Nenets people. It is closely related to the Tundra Nenets language, and the two are still sometimes seen as simply being dialects of a single Nenets language, despite there being low mutual intelligibility between the two. The next closest relatives are Nganasan and Enets, after them Selkup, and even more distantly the other Uralic languages.
In stressed syllables, the vowel phonemes of the Forest Nenets dialect are:
In unstressed syllables length is not contrastive, and there are only five vowel qualities, to wit /æ ɑ ə i u/. Word stress is not fixed to a certain position of a root; this leads to alternations of stressed mid vowels with unstressed high vowels. Long vowels are slightly more common than short vowels, though only short vowels occur in monosyllabic words. The short mid vowels /e o/ in particular are marginal, occurring only in a small number of monosyllabic words and commonly merged into the corresponding high vowels /i u/. This is additionally complicated by the short high vowels /i u/ becoming lowered to /e o/ before /ə/. Because of this, Salminen (2007) argued that the long vowels should be considered the basic and the short vowels the marked phonemes.
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Wikipedia