Nanai language
| Nanai | |
|---|---|
| Нанай, Нанайэ (Nanaj, Nanaje) | |
| Native to | Russia, China |
| Region | Russian Far East, Heilongjiang |
| Ethnicity | Nanai people |
|
Native speakers
|
1,400 (2010) |
|
Tungusic
|
|
| Dialects |
|
| Cyrillic | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | nana1257 |
The Nanai language (also called Gold, Goldi, or Hezhen) is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe. The language has about 1,400 speakers out of 17,000 ethnic Nanai, but most (especially the younger generations) are also fluent in Russian or Chinese, and mostly use one of those languages for communication.
In China, the language is referred to as hè zhé yǔ (Chinese: 赫哲语). The Nanai people there variously refer to themselves as /na nio/, /na bəi/, /na nai/ (which all mean "local people"), /ki lən/, and /χə ɖʐən/, the last being the source of the Chinese ethnonym Hezhe.
The language is distributed across several distantly-located areas:
It is thought that in Russia, the Nanai language has been best preserved in the Nanai District of Khabarovsk Krai, because of the active Nanai-speaking community there, which has been active in working on the publication of books in Nanai, as well as textbooks on the language, and also because of the ethnic autonomous status of the Nanai District. According to Stolyarov's data, the worldwide Nanai population is 11,883, of whom 8,940 live in rural localities of Khabarovsk Krai. However, only 100-150 native speakers of the language remain there. The 2002 Census recorded 12,194 people who claimed to speak the language, 90% in Khabarovsk Krai, 3.5% in Primorsky Krai, 1.3% in Sakhalin Oblast, and no more than 0.5% in any other area; of those, only 49, almost all in Khabarovsk Krai, were not also bilingual in Russian. Three ethnic Nanai villages remain, those being Dzhuen, Ulika, and Dada; in the remaining populated areas, the proportion of Nanais among local residents is much smaller.
Even in Russia, the situation for language preservation is not favorable: the carriers of language are scattered in different villages and often isolated from each other. The Nanai language continues to be used in the sphere of everyday contact among people older than 40. In their contact with people their age or younger, they prefer the Russian language, using Nanaian only for contact with elderly people aged 70 or older. On the whole, the Nanai language has been superseded by Russian in almost all spheres of communication; drastic measures are required for language preservation.
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Wikipedia