Tundra Nenets language
| Tundra Nenets | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Northern Russia |
| Ethnicity | Nenets |
|
Native speakers
|
(95% of Nenets speakers cited 1989) |
| Cyrillic | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | tund1255 |
Tundra Nenets is a Samoyedic language spoken in northern Russia, from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, by the Nenets people. It is closely related to Nganasan and Enets, more distantly related to Selkup and even more distantly to the other Uralic languages. It has a sister language, the Forest Nenets language, and the two are sometimes seen as simply being dialects of a single Nenets language, and sometimes as separate languages. There is low mutual intelligibility between the two. In spite of the huge area in which Tundra Nenets is spoken, Tundra Nenets is very uniform with few dialectal differences.
The language has speakers of all ages and is still passed down to children. In some western parts of where the language is spoken, however, children and young people are increasingly shifting to either Russian or Komi.
The syllable structure of Tundra Nenets is generally CV(C), and syllables with initial, medial or final consonant clusters of more than two consonants are not allowed. Words normally do not begin with a vowel, except in western dialects of the language, mostly due to the loss of /ŋ/, so the standard Tundra Nenets word ŋarka ('big') is found as arka in western varieties.
The number of vowel phonemes in Tundra Nenets is 10, which have 17 distinct allophones governed by palatality, which dominates whole sequences of vowels and consonants. Vowel frontness is not segmentally contrastive.
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