Tundra Nenets language


Tundra Nenets is a Uralic language spoken in European Russia and North-Western Siberia. It is the largest and best-preserved language in the Samoyedic group.
Tundra Nenets is closely related to the Nganasan and Enets languages, and more distantly to Selkup. Tundra Nenets and its sister language, Forest Nenets, are sometimes considered dialects of a single Nenets language, though there is low mutual intelligibility between the two. In spite of the large area in which Tundra Nenets is spoken, the language is very uniform with few dialectal differences.
Geographically, the Tundra Nenets territory spans the Nenets District of the Arkhangelsk Province, as well as parts of the Komi Republic, the Yamal-Nenets District in the Tyumen Province, and the Ust-Yeniseisk region of the Taimyr District in the Krasnoyarsk Region. This territory has been in constant growth over the past millennium, as Tundra Nenets settlers moved further east and engaged with other groups of Enets.
A 2010 census reported 44,640 Nenets, 49% of whom were speakers of the Nenets language. However, while the population of Nenets has been growing in the past few decades, the language itself has been in a decline, as many children are now educated in Russian-language schools and many other ethnic groups have begun settling in Tundra Nenets territories. The language is classified as 6b, indicating that it is still spoken by all age generations, but the number of speakers in decreasing.
Tundra Nenets is spoken primarily within family circles and in traditional economic activities, such as hunting and herding reindeer. The language has no official status within the Russian Federation. In the mid 1930's, an orthography based on the Cyrillic script was developed, which is taught in local schools. However, many Tundra Nenets speakers are primarily literate in Russian. Nonetheless, there is a small amount of Tundra Nenets literature, as well as radio and television broadcasts.

Phonology

Vowels

Tundra Nenets has 10 vowel phonemes, which are categorized into 4 vowel lengths.

longshortover-shortreduced
highī ūi u
mide o
lowǣaə°


There are 17 distinct allophones, governed by palatality. Monophthong vowels are present in the chart below, with their phonemes marked in bold, and with their palatal and non-palatal allophones marked underneath using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

phonemeīūiueoaə°
allophones, , , , , , , ,


The vowel ǣ is interchangeably realized as or . This and the long close vowels only occur in word-initial syllables.
The reduced vowel ° is typically the result of an automatic reduction of the over-short vowel ə in an unstressed position. This leads to surface alternations such as xər° 'knife' vs. xərə-r° 'your knife.' However, there are a few words with ° in an odd-position non-final syllable and in phonological contrast with ə, making it a distinct phoneme. For example, there is the minimal pair səwa-xəna 'good ' and səwa-w°na 'good.'

Consonants

There are 26 consonants in the inventory, spanning five places and seven manners of articulation.

labial non-palatalizedlabial palatalizeddentalpalatalvelarglottal
nasalsmmʲnnʲŋ
voiceless stopsppʲttʲkq/h
voiced stopsbbʲddʲ
affricatesccʲ
fricativesssʲx
glideswj
lateralsllʲ
trillsrrʲ


Most labial consonants have a labial palatalized counterpart, and similarly with dentals and palatals. These consonants are in phonemic contrast, such as in the minimal pair num 'sky' and n'um 'name.' The two phonemic glottal stops h and q have identical phonetic content , but occur in different positions and undergo different alternations. There is also a non-phonemic glottal stop that is sometimes pronounced after other word-final consonants. The trill r may be uvular or a uvular fricative for some speakers.
All consonants can be found word-internally between vowels, but their occurrence in other positions is strongly limited.
Tundra Nenets has sandhi, a phonological process involving the simplification of consonant clusters, both within words and between words. This process produces secondarily derived consonant phonemes from underlying consonant clusters.
As the citation form of a noun is the bare stem, a word ending in a glottal stop in isolation can thus underlyingly end either in a plain glottal stop or in a nasal. The latter is sometimes called a "nasalizable glottal stop", and is written differently from the former in the orthography of the language.

Syllable structure

Tundra Nenets has a V syllable structure, and the minimal word is CV. Thus, there are no word initial or word final consonant clusters, nor are there any three-consonant clusters. Moreover, syllables with zero onset typically cannot occur word-initially, but in Western dialects, the word-initial ŋ is lost, giving some vowel-initial words. For example, the Eastern dialect ŋəno 'boat' becomes əno in the Western dialect. Word-internally, zero onset syllables only occur when ə or ° follow another vowel. For example, such vowel clusters can occur when forming the finite stem: me° 'he takes ' gives meə-s'° 'he took.'

Stress

Tundra Nenets displays bisyllabic trochaic feet that are aligned to the left. Primary stress falls on the initial syllable. Secondary stress falls on subsequent odd syllables and on even-position syllables preceding a syllable with °, excluding the final syllable, as illustrated in the following examples where ´ indicates primary stress on a vowel and ` indicates secondary stress on the preceding vowel:

Morphology

Typical of the Uralic language family, Tundra Nenets has an agglutinating morphological structure with a wide variety of suffixes. There is no prefixation. The two primary word classes are nouns and verbs. Other word classes include adjectives, pronouns, numerals, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, particles, and interjections.
A noun can contain up to five morphemes, including the root, a derivational suffix, a possessive suffix, a number suffix, and a case suffix. A verb can contain up to six or seven morphemes, including the root, one or two derivational suffixes, a tense suffix, a mood suffix, a subject agreement suffix, and an object agreement suffix. Although the morphology is predominately agglutinating, there are some suffixes that express multiple meanings, as well as periphrastic clausal negation and some auxiliary verbs.

Derivational affixes

Tundra Nenets contains a few nominal derivational affixes that can be used to denote a cause, express an instrument, or refer to a location of action. For example, the noun xərwa-bco 'wish' can be derived from the verb xərwa- 'to want'. There are also several mixed categories of nouns that have a syntactic distribution of a different word-class, yet share other properties with nouns. For example, the proprietive suffix -sawey° can be used to derive nouns with the meaning 'with X, having X', as in yī-sawey° 'intelligent'.
Tundra Nenets has two verbal aspectual classes, perfective and imperfective. There are several derivational aspectual suffixes which can change the aspectual class of a verb. For example, imperfectivizing suffixes can be used to express durative, frequentative, multiplicative, and iterative meanings, such as in tola-bə 'to keep counting'. There are also denominal verbs with the meaning 'to use as X, to have as X', which are formed from the accusative plural stem, such as in səb'i-q' 'to use as a hat'.

Inflectional affixes

Nouns are inflected for number, case, and possessive, which can indicate the person and number of the possessor. For example, the following noun is inflected for similative case and third person plural number.
Verbs are inflected for agreement, tense, and mood. Present tense is unmarked, but Tundra Nenets distinguishes inflectionally the past, future, habitual, and future-in-the-past tenses. There are sixteen moods, which include the imperative, hortative, optative, conjunctive, necessitative, interrogative, probabilitative, obligative, potential, and inferential. For example, the verb below is inflected for subjunctive mood, first person singular agreement, and past tense.

Clitics

undergo the same phonological processes and stress assignment as affixes. They can attach to an affirmative finite verb, a negative auxiliary, or a non-verbal final predicate, and follow any other inflection, as shown with the following exclamative clitic:

Particles

Particles are primarily used for discourse. Common particles include yekar°q 'it is unknown', ŋod'°q 'hardly', tǣr'i 'just, very', and məs'iq 'maybe, perhaps.' An example is given below:

Compounding

There are some lexical noun-noun compounds in Tundra Nenets. As shown in the following example, the first element in the compound cannot be modified or take a number.

Suppletion

A few irregular verbs show suppletion. The most frequent suppletive verbs are xǣ- ‘to go, to depart’, ŋǣ- ‘to be’, to- ‘to come’, ta- ‘to bring, to give’ and the negative auxiliary nʹi-. Some common suppletive forms for these verbs are given in the table below.

to go/departto beto cometo bring, givenegative auxiliary
3SGxəyaŋato°ta°nʹī
CONNEGxanʹ°qŋaq tuqtaq-
IMPF PARTxǣnaŋǣdatonatada~tananʹinʹa
IMP 2SGxanʹ°qŋaqtuqtaqnʹon°
FUT 3SGxan°tə°ŋǣŋutūtə°tətə°-

Syntax

Basic word order

Tundra Nenets is predominantly a head-final SOV language. Verb finality is the primary constraint on word order. Below are examples of the basic word order for a transitive and intransitive sentence.
However, although most simple sentences have SOV order, a more general trend is for the informationally new element to be immediately preverbal and to be preceded by the informationally old element. So, it is possible to have sentences where the direct object precedes the subject, as illustrated below:

Possessee + possessor

The possessor precedes the thing being possessed.

Adjective (comparative) + standard

Comparative adjectives follow their standards, which take the ablative case.

Determiner + noun phrase

The determiner precedes the noun phrase.

Orthography

The alphabet of Tundra Nenets is based on Cyrillic, with the addition of three letters: Ӈ ӈ, ʼ, and ˮ.

Vowels

The palatalized and plain vowel allophones are distinguished in the original orthography


The Cyrillic orthography does not distinguish the reduced vowel from a, nor the long ī and ū from their short counterparts i and u. ǣ is not found in a palatalized environment, and thus does not show up in the chart. The schwa,, has no direct counterpart in the Cyrillic orthography and is in most cases not written. However, it may sometimes appear as,,, or. For example, ', is written as хад, and ' is written as ныхы.

Consonants

The consonants in the Cyrillic orthography can be seen in the chart below. Note that palatalized consonants are not included.

phonemic transcription
Cyrillicмпбвнтдцсйлрӈкхˮʼ


The letter marks a "plain" glottal stop, while marks a glottal stop derived from a word-final n. As in Russian, the consonants are palatalized using the soft sign,. For example, the palatalized consonant ' is represented with in Cyrillic unless it is followed by a palatalizing vowel, such as, so that ' is written as.

Sample text

'
Ет хибяри ненэць соямарианта хуркари правада тнява, ӈобой ненээя ниду нись токалба, ӈыбтамба илевату тара.
Transliteration
Et xibjari nenėc’ sojamarianta xurkari pravada tnjava, ṇoboj nenėėja nidu nic’ tokalba, ṇybtamba ilevatu tara.
Translation'''
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.