The Vanji language, also spelt Vanchi and Vanži, is an extinct
Iranian
Iranian may refer to:
* Iran, a sovereign state
* Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran
* Iranian lan ...
language, one of the
areal
Areal can refer to:
* An adjective pertaining to an area
* Areal, Rio de Janeiro, a municipality in Brazil
* António Areal (1934—1978), Portuguese painter
* Sofia Areal (born 1960), Portuguese painter, António Areal's daughter
See also
* Are ...
group of
Pamir languages
The Pamir languages are an areal group of the Eastern Iranian languages, spoken by numerous people in the Pamir Mountains, primarily along the Panj River and its tributaries.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pamir language family wa ...
. It was spoken in the
Vanj River
The Vanj ( tg, Ванҷ, russian: Ванч ''Vanch'') is a river in east Tajikistan. It is a right tributary of the Panj in Vanj District, north-western Gorno-Badakhshan. The river is long and has a basin area of .[Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region
Gorno-Badakhshan, officially the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region,, abbr. / is an autonomous region in eastern Tajikistan, in the Pamir Mountains. It makes up nearly forty-five percent of the country's land area, but only two percen ...]
of
Tajikistan
Tajikistan (, ; tg, Тоҷикистон, Tojikiston; russian: Таджикистан, Tadzhikistan), officially the Republic of Tajikistan ( tg, Ҷумҳурии Тоҷикистон, Jumhurii Tojikiston), is a landlocked country in Centr ...
.
In the 19th century the region was forcibly annexed to the
Bukharan Emirate
The Emirate of Bukhara ( fa, , Amārat-e Bokhārā, chg, , Bukhārā Amirligi) was a Muslim polity in Central Asia that existed from 1785 to 1920 in what is modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It occupied the lan ...
and a campaign of violent assimilation undertaken, and by the end of the 19th century, the Vanji language had completely disappeared, displaced by
Tajik Persian as a result of assimilation.
Documentation
The Russian linguist
Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin ( rus, Иван Иванович Зарубин; 27 September 1887 – 3 February 1964) was a Soviet specialist of Iranian languages, particularly Pamir languages.
Life
Zarubin was born in 1887.Paul Bergne The Birth of ...
was the first to assess the language in the early 20th century, by which time it was already extinct. Zarubin was able to collect only words and phrases recalled by older inhabitants of the region as having been spoken by their grandparents who still knew something of the language, and he considered it one of the Pamir languages.
Features
The language as reconstructed
[Lashkarbekov, B. B, ''Старованджский язык'', Moscow (2008), quoted in ''Problem of Archaism and Innovation in the Eastern Iranian Languages'', Ľubomír Novák, 2013] had a phonology consisting of the
stop consonants p, b, t, d, k, g and q, the
fricative consonant
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ, x, ɣ, χ, ʁ and h, the
affricate consonants t͡ʃ and d͡ʒ and the
sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels ar ...
s m, w, n, r, l, j and ŋ as well as the vowels a, e, ẹ, i, ə, o, ü and u. Much less can be discerned about the grammar of Vanji: there were probably two
genders
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultur ...
, masculine and feminine, with plurals of nouns formed by adding a suffix ''-ev'',
comparative
general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well ...
forms of adjectives by adding ''-tar'' and
Infinitive
Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is de ...
s of verbs were formed by adding ''-ak''.
References
*
Pamir languages
Eastern Iranian languages
Languages of Tajikistan
Extinct languages of Asia
Languages extinct in the 19th century
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