Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova-Andzhighatova (, ; c. 1893 – 20 September 1989) was the last living speaker of the

Kamas language Kamas () is an extinct Samoyedic language, formerly spoken by the Kamasins. It is included by convention in the Southern group together with Mator and Selkup (although this does not constitute a subfamily). The last native speaker of Kamas, K ...

(and thus of any of the Sayan

Samoyedic languages The Samoyedic () or Samoyed languages () are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether, accordingly called the Samoyedic peoples. They derive from a common ancestral language called Pr ...

). Her father was a Russian named Zakhar Perov and her mother was a Kamassian named Afanasiya Andzhighatova. Plotnikova-Andzhighatova and her parents are in slot 14 on the chart the Finnish linguist

Kai Donner Karl (Kai) Reinhold Donner (1 April 1888 – 12 February 1935) was a Finland, Finnish linguist, ethnography, ethnographer and politician. He carried out expeditions to the Ob-Ugrians, Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic peoples in Siberia 1911–1914 ...

made of the Abalakovo Kamassian families. Plotnikova-Andzhighatova did not have the opportunity to speak Kamassian after 1950 because she did not know anyone else who could speak it. Despite that, her Kamassian skills were fairly good, and she was a great help to philologists for the rest of her life. Plotnikova-Andzhighatova spoke fluent

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

, which she had learned in early childhood. With the decline of her native language, Russian became her only language. This affected her Kamas skills, especially her pronunciation, vocabulary, and sentence structures. Russian influence especially showed in her sentence structures and use of vocabulary: many morphologic forms and syntactic structures fell into disuse.D. Abondolo (1998). The Uralic Languages. Routledge; 1 edition. . .

Legacy

In October 2023, an information stand was installed by a group of enthusiasts at the initiative of the chairman of the Malinovskoye Rural Settlement in memory of Plotnikova in the village of Abalakovo.

References

1890s births 1989 deaths Last known speakers of a language {{Russia-bio-stub