Nganasan Language

The Nganasan language (formerly called , ''tavgiysky'', or , ''tavgiysko-samoyedsky'' in Russian; from the ethnonym , ''tavgi'') is a moribund Samoyedic language spoken by about 30 of the Nganasan people. It is notable for its unusual characteristics among the Samoyedic languages, as well among the greater Uralic languages.

Classification

Nganasan is the most divergent language of the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family (Janhunen 1998). There are two main dialects, Avam (, ) and Vadeyev (). A part of the vocabulary can be traced to elements of unknown substrate origin, which are roughly twice as common in Nganasan than in other Samoyedic languages such as Nenets or Enets, and bear no apparent resemblance to the neighboring Tungusic and Yukaghir languages. The source of this substrate remains a mystery so far. It is possible that this substrate represents the last remaining evidence of a now-extinct Paleo-Siberian language once spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula, which was later supplanted by Nganasan.

Phonology

Nganasan has 10 vowel phonemes and 21 consonant phonemes.

Vowels

Several disyllabic sequences of vowels are possible:

The sequences // and // also occur, but only across morpheme boundaries.

The vowels and only occur in initial syllables.

Vowels can be divided two pairs of groups based on harmony: front vs back , and unrounded vs rounded . Backness harmony only applies to high vowels.

Front vowels do not occur after initial dental consonants.

do not occur after palatal consonants, as they have fronted to , although the first of these only happens in word-initial syllables.

does not occur after palatal consonants, having been neutralized into .

does not occur after labial consonants, having unrounded to in this position.

Consonants

One of the main features of Nganasan is consonant gradation, which concerns the consonant phonemes alternating with and their nasal combinations with .

* is labialized before and
* has the allophone before other consonants, although this can also be analyzed as an "unusual" allophone of
* has the allophone when not before a vowel
* is lenited to intervocalically

Orthography

The language's Cyrillic-based alphabet was devised in the 1990s:

Morphology

Nouns

Nouns in Nganasan have the grammatical categories of number (singular, dual, plural), case (nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, elative, prolative, comitative) and possessivity (non-possessive versus possessive forms). Nganasan lacks determiners; however, the possessive forms of second person singular and third person singular can be used to express definiteness.

Pronouns

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 possessed forms of the postposition ''na-''. Other pronouns are inflected like nouns (Helimski, 1998).

Verbs

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.

Conjugation

The subjective conjugation is used when there is no object or the object is focused. The objective conjugation is used with transitive words. The reflexive conjugation is used for some intransitive verbs. Each conjugation type has its own personal endings. There are three subtypes of objective conjugation endings that correspond to object number.

Mood

Nganasan has a broad mood paradigm with nine forms: indicative, imperative, interrogative, inferential, renarrative, irrealis, optative, admissive-cohortive, debitive, abessive and prohibitive. Mood forms are mostly built with the help of affixation but special particles are also sometimes used. All mood forms, except the imperative, have the same personal suffixes. Tenses are distinguished in the indicative, imperative and interrogative moods (Tereščenko, 1979).

Aspect and tense

Most corresponding imperfective and perfective stems have the same root, but in rare cases the roots can be different. The aspectual opposition between imperfective and perfective verbs remains semantic in most verbal forms. However, in the indicative mood it is used to express present continuous and present perfect meanings, respectively. In this case, the opposition is present formally: imperfective verbs take imperfective suffixes and the perfective ones have the perfective suffixes (Helimski, 1998). Imperfective verbs can also express future meanings. These forms are not considered tense in the strict sense. The proper tense forms of past and future include past, past perfect, future, future-in-the past (Katzschmann, 2008).

Non-finite verb forms

Syntax

Word order

The dominating word order in Nganasan is SOV, similar to other Samoyedic languages. However, Nganasan is considered to exhibit more freedom in word order than other languages of its group. According to Tereščenko (1979), other types of word orders are used for shifting the sentence focus, especially in emphatic speech. The focused constituent usually immediately precedes the verb. Wagner-Nagy (2010) suggests that Nganasan is similar to Hungarian in its behavior, in that its word order is determined by pragmatic factors rather than being fixed.

On the phrase level, the attributes within the noun phrase usually precede the noun and become focused when placed after it. Numerals and adjectives agree with the heads in case, and adjectives also agree with the head in number. The case agreement is only complete in grammatical cases; in locative cases the attribute gets genitive form. There are no prepositions in Nganasan, postpositions are composite parts of words and also require the attributes in genitive cases. Possession is expressed with genitive construction or by a possessive suffix attached to the possessed (Helimski, 1998; Katzschmann, 2008).

Nganasan is a pro-drop language: pronominal subjects are often omitted when the verb conjugation type is subjective (Tereščenko, 1979).

Negation

Standard negation is expressed by negative auxiliary (''ńi-'') followed by the main verb in connegative form marked with ʔ, e.g. ''ńi-ndɨ-m konɨʔ'' "I do not go". All inflectional markers are taken by the negation auxiliary (Gusev, 2015). Objects in the form of personal, negative or demonstrative pronouns can be inserted between the negative auxiliary and the main verb (Wagner-Nagy, 2011). There are a few negative verbs other than ''ni-'', such as ''kasa'' — "nearly", ''ləði'' — "vainly", ''əku'' — "maybe", and ''ŋuəli'' — "of course", but their functionality is restricted, with only ''ni-'' having a full paradigm.

Existential sentences are negated with the negative existential predicate ''d'aŋku'' or its derivative stem ''d'anguj-''. ''D'aŋku'' can only be used in present indicative as it behaves like a noun: it takes nominal predicative endings. D'anguj- (a composite of d'aŋku and ij- "be") is used for all other tense/mood combinations.

Subordination

Subordination is typically formed by constructions with non-finite verbal forms. Such constructions are usually placed before the constituents they modify. The relative construction is always placed immediately before the modified constituent, whereas other types of constructions allow other constituents to interfere. The word order in such construction is the same as in simple sentences (Tereščenko, 1973).

Coordination

Coordination is most often achieved by means of intonation. Sometimes pronominal and adverbial derivatives can be used as conjunctions. For example, adverb ŋonə 'also' can be used as conjunction. The category of conjunctions may be undergoing formation under the influence of Russian (Tereščenko, 1973).

Education

Compulsory education did not exist for Nganasans until the 1930s. Until then, Nganasans were illiterate with no exceptions. Not many Nganasans spoke Russian; any spoken Russian would not be in standard Russian. Rather, it would be a pidgin called Taimyr Pidgin Russian or Govorka.

The first school was founded in Dudinka in 1920. After its foundation, other villages started to have schools. Russian was taught as the primary language in these schools, not only because the administration desired to Russify the population, but also due to the fact Nganasan was spoken rather than written until the 1980s.

In schools, there are some learning materials for some age groups: Volochanka pupils only learn their heritage language 2 times a week. The Ust'ye Avam pupils no longer have this education, as their school closed after it burned down in 2012.,
Chapter 1: ''Introduction''

Media

In 2019 professor Beáta Wagner-Nagy, who did fieldwork at Taimyr, reported the following. ''Radio Taimyr'' (as of 2025 it also has the name " Radio Rossii Taimyr",https://smotrim.ru/article/4442363 a part of the VGTRK), with its station in Dudinka have their broadcasts in Nganasan language daily since 1990, but these programs are only of 10–15 minutes long. 24 percent of Nganasan do listen to the radio program; some more want to but do not have a radio set. There are no TV broadcasts in Nganasan. Since 1993, the (renamed from ''Sovetsky Taimyr'' following the end of the CPSU and abolition of a system of government called a Soviet republic) has been irregularly publishing news and other stories in Nganasan.

Literature

* Gusev, V. (2015) Negation in Nganasan. In Miestamo, M., Tamm, A., Wagner-Nagy, B. (ed.) Negation in Uralic Languages, 103–312. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. .
* Helimski, Еugene. (1994). Очерк морфонологии и словоизменительной морфологии нганасанского языка. ''Таймырский этнолингвистический сборник'' (1), 190–221.
* Helimski, Eugene. (1998) Nganasan. In Abondolo, Daniel (ed.), The Uralic Languages, 480–515. London: Routledge.
*
*
* Tereščenko, N.M. (1986) Алфавит нганасанского языка, in Skorik P.A. (ed.), Палеоазиатские языки, Leningrad: Nauka.
* Tereščenko, N.M. (1979) Нганасанский язык, Leningrad: Nauka.
* Tereščenko, N.M. (1973) Синтакс самодийских языков, Leningrad: Nauka.
* Wagner-Nagy, B. (2002) Chrestomathia Nganasanica. (Studia Uralo-Altaica: Supplementum 10) Szeged. .
* Wagner-Nagy, B. (2010) Existential and possessive predicate phrases in Nganasan. In Gusev, V. and Widmer, A., Finnisch-Ugrische Mitteilungen, 32/33. Hamburg: Buske.
* Wagner-Nagy, B. (2011) On the typology of negation in Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic languages (MSFOu 262). Helsinki: SUS.
* Wagner-Nagy, B. (2018). ''A grammar of Nganasan'' (Vol. 6). Brill.

References

External links

Endangered Languages of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia: The Nganasan Language

The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire: The Nganasans

Comparative Nenets–Nganasan dictionary (with Russian and English equivalents)

Nganasan multimedia dictionary



Nganasanica

{{Uralic languages

Indigenous languages of Siberia
Northern Samoyedic languages
Subject–object–verb languages
Endangered Uralic languages