Multimedia documentation
of the endangered Vasyugan and Alexandrovo Khanty dialects
of Tomsk region in Siberia
(ELDP FTG 0135)
Eastern Khanty
Dialects
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The Uralic languages spoken in
Russia and minority Uralic languages in other countries are threatened by
extinction as the native language competence in children and young people is
becoming increasingly low, they are mostly educated only in majority language
(Russian, Norwegian, Lithuanian) and grow up in a predominantly mainstream
cultural environment.
In the book ''Northern Minority
Languages. Problems of Survival'' (Shoji, Janhunen 1997), M.Krauss presents
data concerning Uralic peoples and the number of speakers of their languages.
This evaluation of viability by age distribution of speakers is as follows: a
(language spoken by all generations, learned by practically all children), a-
(learned by nearly all or most children), b (spoken by all adults, parental
age and up, but learned by few or no children), b- (spoken by adults in
their thirties and older, but not by younger parents, and probably no
children), c (spoken only by middle-aged adults and older, forties and
up), c- (fifties and up), -d (sixties and up), d
(seventies and up), d-(seventies and up, fewer than 10). With regards to
Khanty, these data are as follows (adapted from M.Krauss 1997):
|
Khanty |
Total Population |
Number of Speakers |
Viability Status |
Country / Region |
|
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15,000 |
7,500 |
a-c |
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5,000 |
4,500 |
a- |
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<1,000 |
0? |
d-e? |
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Based on his count, M.Krauss draws
the conclusions that from part of the Uralic languages some have already become
extinct in the last two centuries (Yurats, Kamass, Mator, southern and western
Mansi, southern Khanty). Some of them have better viability status designation
of a, meaning that there may be some children, but generally few, if
any, who speak the language, which accordingly, may have some chance of
survival into the future. Krauss writes, "Larger numbers and the heavy
concentration in the Obdorsk-Yamal region of traditional speakers of northern
Khanty of all generations and exceptionally strong maintenance of eastern
Khanty qualify those languages among the strongest northern languages in
Based on our field work over the
last 10 years the above statistics could be amended with regards to the Eastern
Khanty dialects: Alexandrovo and Vasyugan (table below), and perhaps, the total number
of these
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Total Population |
Number of Speakers |
Viability Status |
Country / Region |
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>120 |
>20 |
c- |
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>150 |
>20 |
c-/-d |
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Origin of the Uralic language family
Since the time of the discovery of
common features in Uralic languages, mainly in the 19th century, the problem of
explaining the distribution of these clearly genetically affiliated languages
over the vast geographical area has remained. Based on the interdisciplinary
studies (linguistic, archaeological, genetic, etc.) a number of concepts was
posited with regards to the location of an ancient Uralic proto-home: (i) east
in western Siberia, or on both sides of the North-Urals;
(ii) on both sides of the Central and South-Urals; (iii) on the European side
far to the east; (iv) on the European side far to the west; (v) a narrow area
along the Volga and its tributaries; (vi) a vast area between the Urals and the
Baltics inhabited by ancient Uralic people of a Uralic proto-race, who spoke
the Uralic proto-language, enjoying the Uralic proto-culture. There is also a
very plausible 'lingua franca' approach positing a vast contact area of
remotely related languages/cultures in the state of on-going contact, using a
variety of Uralic proto-languages for communication. "At any rate, it
should be born in mind that 6000 years ago there was no Garden of Eden any
more, there were many languages which must have been in contact among
themselves. The incidence of a common Proto-Uralic is logically highly
improbable" (Suhonen 1997:89).
Based on the widely accepted (in
In western
Siberia, the eastern Uralic group of the Ugric languages display a number
of similar features:
- morphologically distinguished
transitive and intransitive forms;
- dual number;
- reflection of a number of object
in the verb structure;
- possible expression of the object
of the clause by a locative;
- possible expression of the subject
of the clause by a locative;
- predicative declension of
substantives;
- addition of a redundant element in
the expression of tempus.
With regard to syntax, the members
of the Uralic language family are much closer. The similarities can constitute
(as far as they do not represent language universals) retention of ancestral
features from the time of the Uralic Protolanguage.
The Khanty language is one of two
Ob-Ugric languages (the other being Mansi), which together with Hungarian
comprise the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric group of Uralic language family.
The main dialectal divide is between
the big dialectal clustering: of western (northern tundra) vs. eastern
(southern+eastern forest hunter-fishers).
Eastern dialects are less described
and more endangered, with no regular native language teaching or native
media. The number of speakers steadily reduces placing some of the dialects in
serious threat of extinction within the next 15 years.
The core Khanty vocabulary still
contains numerous examples of vocabulary inherited from the Finno-Ugric
proto-language (Collinder, 1962). Khanty is predominantly an agglutinative
language with no prepositions and numerous affixes, each of which expresses a
particular function.
Among the important features
traditionally listed as typical for Khanty are the following:
· The non-emphatic indicative word
order of a simple clause is SOV.
· The word order may vary relatively
freely for pragmatic purposes, which is evident from a large number of
morphological cases (from 3 in the west vs. up to 10 in eastern Khanty).
· Within the verbal, nominal, etc.
phrases, there is a rigidly fixed word order, with the modifier preceding the
headword: the attribute, quantifier, determiner preceding the head
nominal, the object and adverbs preceding the verbal predicate, and with
postpositions following the nominal head.
· Within the nominal phrase, there is
no agreement between headword and modifier neither in case nor in number, etc.
· The grammatical relations and
argument structure follows the Nom-Acc patterns in the west, while also
robustly using the so called ergative constructions in the east.
© Andrey Filchenko. Tomsk State
Komsomolsky pr. 75, k.246, Tomsk 634041 Russia.
E-mail:
filtchenko [at] policy.hu
Last updated: April 2008.