Nganasan language
| Nganasan | |
|---|---|
| ня” njaʔ | |
| Pronunciation | [nʲɐʔ] |
| Native to | Russia |
| Region | Taymyr Autonomous Okrug |
| Ethnicity | 860 Nganasans (2010 census) |
|
Native speakers
|
130 (2010 census) |
| Dialects | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | ngan1291 |
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.
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). Vocabulary can be traced elements of the unknown substrate origin.
The language has 10 vowels and about 20 consonant phonemes.
Several bisyllabic sequences of vowels are possible:
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/.
The language's Cyrillic-based alphabet was devised in the 1990s:
Nouns in Nganasan have the grammatical categories of number (singular, dual, plural), case (nominative, genetive, accusative, lative, locative, elative, prolative, comitative) and possessivity (non-possessive versus possessive forms). Nganasan lacks determiners, however, the possesive forms of second person singular and third person singular can be used to express definiteness (Katzschmann, 2008).
Case
Nganasan has personal, demonstrative, interrogative, negative and determinative pronouns. Personal pronouns are not inflected: their grammatical case forms coincide and their local case forms are expressed by the corresponding possessive case forms of the postposition na-. Other pronouns are inflected like nouns (Helimski, 1998).
Verbs agree with their subjects in person and number, and have three conjugation types. Like other Samoyedic languages, Nganasan has the opposition of perfective and imperfective verbs.
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