Eastern Khanty is a
Uralic language
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...
, frequently considered a dialect of a
Khanty language
Khanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (), is a branch of the Ugric languages composed of multiple dialect continuum, dialect continua. It is varyingly considered a language or a collection of distinct languages spoken i ...
, spoken by about 1,000 people.
The majority of these speakers speak the Surgut dialect, as the Vakh-Vasyugan and Salym varieties have been rapidly declining in favor of Russian.
The former two have been used as literary languages since the late 20th century, with Surgut being more widely used due to its less isolated location and higher number of speakers.
Classification
Dialects
Classification of Eastern Khanty dialects:
* Far Eastern (
Vakh
The Vakh () is a river in Khanty–Mansia, Russia. It is a right tributary of the Ob. The Vakh is long with a basin area of .
The river is a status B Ramsar wetland, nominated for designation as a Wetland of International Importance in 2000. ...
,
Vasjugan, Verkhne-Kalimsk, Vartovskoe)
*
Surgut
Surgut ( rus, Сургу́т, p=sʊrˈgut; Khanty: Сәрханӆ, ''Sərhanł, Сө̆ркут, sörkut'') is a city in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia, located on the Ob River near its junction with the Irtysh River. It is one of the fe ...
(Jugan, Malij Jugan,
Pim, Likrisovskoe,
Tremjugan-Tromagan)
The Vakh, Vasyugan, Alexandrovo and Yugan (Jugan) dialects have less than 300 speakers in total.
Transitional
The
Salym dialect can be classified as transitional between Eastern and Southern (Honti 1998 suggests closer affinity with Eastern, Abondolo 1998 in the same work with Southern). The Atlym and Nizyam dialects also show some Southern features.
Phonology
Eastern Khanty corresponds to in the northern and southern languages.
Vakh
Vakh has the richest vowel inventory, with five reduced vowels and full . Some researchers also report .
Surgut
Surgut Khanty has five reduced vowels and full vowels .
Alphabet
The Khanty letters with a tick or tail at bottom, namely ''
Қ Ԯ Ң Ҳ Ҷ'', are sometimes rendered with a diagonal tail, i.e. , and sometimes with a curved tail, i.e. . However, in the case of Surgut such graphic variation needs to be handled by the font, because there are no Unicode characters to hard-code ''Ҷ'' with a diagonal tail, and Unicode has refused a request to encode a variant of ''Ҷ'' with a curved tail (, approximated in unicode as Ч̡ч̡), the reasoning being that it would be an
allograph
In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...
rather than a distinct letter. (The same is true of the other curved-tail variants in Unicode; those were encoded by mistake.)
[L2/23-015](_blank)
''Comments on CYRILLIC CHE WITH HOOK’s use in Khanty and Tofa (Tofalar) (L2/22-280)''.
Grammar
The Vakh dialect is divergent. It has rigid
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...
and a
tripartite
Tripartite means composed of or split into three parts, or refers to three parties. Specifically, it may also refer to any of the following:
* 3 (number)
* Tripartite alignment, in linguistics
* Tripartite motto, or hendiatris, a figure of speech ...
(ergative–accusative) case system, where the subject of a
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that entails one or more transitive objects, for example, 'enjoys' in ''Amadeus enjoys music''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not entail transitive objects, for example, 'arose' in ''Beatrice arose ...
takes the instrumental case suffix ''-nə-'', while the object takes the accusative case suffix. The subject of an
intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Add ...
, however, is not marked for case and might be said to be ''absolutive''. The transitive verb agrees with the subject, as in
nominative–accusative systems.
Vocabulary
Numerals
References
Notes
Sources
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{{Uralic languages
Khanty language
Indigenous languages of Siberia