Tundra Nenets
Nenec, Nenetsy, Nentse, Yurak, Yurak Samoyed
ненэця' вадаnenécja' vada
Pronunciation	[nʲenet͡sʲɑʔwɑdɑ]
Native to	NorthernRussia
Ethnicity	Nenets
Native speakers	21,900 (2010)[1]
Language family	Uralic Samoyedic (core) Enets–Nenets Nenets Tundra Nenets
Writing system	Cyrillic
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	nene1249
ELP	Tundra Nenets
Distribution of Nenets languages in the 21st century.[2][3]
Tundra Nenets is classified as Definitely Endangered by theUNESCOAtlas of the World's Languages in Danger
This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA.

Tundra Nenets (endonym:ненэця' вадаnenécja' vada,Nenets pronunciation:[nʲenet͡sʲɑʔwɑdɑ]) is aUralic language spoken in EuropeanRussia and North-WesternSiberia. It is the largest and best-preserved language in theSamoyedic group.^[4]: 1–2

Tundra Nenets is closely related to theNganasan andEnets language, and more distantly toSelkup. Tundra Nenets and its sister language,Forest Nenets, are sometimes considered dialects of a single Nenets language, though there is lowmutual intelligibility between the two. In spite of the large area in which Tundra Nenets is spoken, the language is very uniform with few dialectal differences.^[5]: 13

Geographically, the Tundra Nenets territory spans the Nenets District of theArkhangelsk Province, as well as parts of theKomi Republic, theYamal-Nenets District in the Tyumen Province, and the Ust-Yeniseisk region of the Taimyr District in theKrasnoyarsk Region. This territory has been in constant growth over the past millennium, as Tundra Nenets settlers moved further east and engaged with other groups ofEnets.^[4]: 3

A 2010 census reported 44,640 Nenets, 49% of whom were speakers of the Nenets language. However, while the population of Nenets has been growing in the past few decades, the language itself has been in a decline, as many children are now educated in Russian-language schools and many other ethnic groups have begun settling in Tundra Nenets territories.^[4]: 5–6 The language is classified as 6b (Threatened), indicating that it is still spoken by all age generations, but the number of speakers is decreasing.^[6]

Tundra Nenets is spoken primarily within family circles and in traditional economic activities, such as hunting and reindeer herding. The language has no official status within the Russian Federation. In the mid-1930s, an orthography based on theCyrillic script was developed, which is taught in local schools. However, many Tundra Nenets speakers are primarily literate inRussian. Nonetheless, there is a small amount of Tundra Nenets literature, and radio and television broadcasts are available in the language.^[4]: 7–8

Thesyllable structure of Tundra Nenets is generallyCV(C), and syllables with initial, medial or finalconsonant clusters of more than two consonants do not occur. Words normally begin with a consonant, except in western dialects of the language, mostly due to the loss of/ŋ/, so the standard Tundra Nenets wordŋarka ('big') is found asarka in western varieties.^[7]

The number ofconsonantphonemes in Tundra Nenets is 27.^[8] All labial and coronal consonants other than the semivowels/w/ and/j/ have plain andpalatalized counterparts.

All consonants can be found word-internally between vowels, but their occurrence in other positions is strongly limited.^[10]

• Only the 16 consonants shown on darker gray background may occur word-initially.
• Syllable-finally, most consonant contrasts are not found, and only six consonants occur:/b/,/ʔ/,/m/,/n~ŋ/,/l/,/r/.

Tundra Nenets has aphonological process ofsandhi: the simplification ofconsonant clusters, both within words (such as in inflection) and between words. This allows considering some of the consonant phonemes secondarily derived fromunderlying consonant clusters.^[11]

• Fortition of fricatives: when preceded by a consonant, the fricatives/s/,/sʲ/,/x/ become the affricates / stops/ts/,/tsʲ/,/k/ respectively.
• A syllable-final glottal stop/ʔ/ is lost before any obstruent consonants.
• A word-final non-labial nasal/n/ is lost when followed by a sonorant, and becomes a glottal stop utterance finally. Within a word, the cluster/nj/ may occur.

As thecitation form of a noun is the bare stem, a word ending in a glottal stop in isolation can thus underlyingly end either in a plain glottal stop or in a nasal. The latter is sometimes called a "nasalizable glottal stop", and is in the orthography of the language written differently from the former.

The number ofvowelphonemes in Tundra Nenets is 10, and they have 17 distinctallophones governed bypalatality, which dominates whole sequences of vowels and consonants.^[12] Vowelfrontness is not segmentally contrastive.

Monophthongs are present in the chart below.Phonemes are marked in bold, with their palatal (on the left) and non-palatal (on the right) allophones marked underneath using theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.

There is also a vowel⟨æ⟩, which isinterchangeably realized as[æ͡e̘] or[æː]. This and the long close vowels only occur in word-initial syllables.

In much of the literature on Tundra Nenets and its sister dialect,Forest Nenets, a so-calledreduced vowel is mentioned. This reduced vowel was thought to have two distinct qualities depending on whether it was found in astressed or unstressed position. In stressed position it was transcribed as⟨ø⟩ and represented a reduced variant of an underlying vowel, and in unstressed position it was transcribed as⟨â⟩ and represented a reduced variant of/a/. Recently, however, it has become clear that the reduced vowels are in fact short vowels, counterparts to their respective long vowels. Today⟨â⟩ should simply be replaced by⟨a⟩, while⟨ø⟩ simply represents a short vowel, although it is not specified which short vowel in this orthography.^[13]

Tundra Nenets has a (C)V(C) syllable structure, and the minimal word is CV. Thus, there are no word-initial or word-final consonant clusters, nor are there any three-consonant clusters. Moreover, syllables with zero onset typically cannot occur word-initially, but in Western dialects, the word-initialŋ is lost, giving some vowel-initial words. For example, the Eastern dialectŋəno 'boat' becomesəno in the Western dialect.^[4]: 27 Word-internally, zero onset syllables only occur whenə or ° follow another vowel. For example, such vowel clusters can occur when forming the finite stem:me° 'he takes (3SG)' givesmeə-s'° 'he took (3SG.PST).'^{[4]: 27–28}

Tundra Nenets displays bisyllabictrochaic feet that are aligned to the left.Primary stress falls on the initial syllable.Secondary stress falls on subsequent odd syllables and on even-position syllables preceding a syllable with °, excluding the final syllable,^[4]: 28 as illustrated in the following examples:

Thealphabet of Tundra Nenets is based onCyrillic, with the addition of three letters:Ӈ ӈ,ʼ, andˮ.

Thepalatalized and plain vowel allophones are distinguished in the original orthography^{[5]: 36–37}

The Cyrillic orthography does not distinguish the reduced vowel froma, nor the longī andū from their short counterpartsi andu.ǣ is not found in a palatalized environment, and thus does not show up in the chart. Theschwa,[ə], has no direct counterpart in the Cyrillic orthography and is in most cases not written. However, it may sometimes appear as⟨а⟩,⟨я⟩,⟨ы⟩,⟨ӗ⟩ or⟨ŏ⟩. For example,xad°, ('snowstorm') is written asхад, andnix° ('power') is written asныхы.^{[5]: 34–35}

The consonants in the Cyrillic orthography can be seen in the chart below. Note thatpalatalized consonants are not included.^[5]: 38

The letter⟨ˮ⟩ marks a "plain" glottal stop, while⟨ʼ⟩ marks a glottal stop derived from a word-finaln. As inRussian, the consonants are palatalized using the soft sign,⟨ь⟩. For example, the palatalized consonantm' is represented with⟨мь⟩ in Cyrillic unless it is followed by a palatalizingvowel, such as⟨ё⟩, so thatm'o is written as⟨мё⟩.^[5]: 38

Typical of the Uralic language family, Tundra Nenets has anagglutinative morphological structure with a wide variety ofsuffixes. There is noprefixation. The two primary word classes arenouns andverbs. Other word classes include adjectives, pronouns, numerals, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, particles, and interjections.^[4]: 8–9

A noun can contain up to five morphemes, including the root, a derivational suffix, a possessive suffix, a number suffix, and a case suffix. A verb can contain up to six or seven morphemes, including the root, one or two derivational suffixes, a tense suffix, a mood suffix, a subject agreement suffix, and an object agreement suffix. Although the morphology is predominately agglutinative, there are some suffixes that express multiple meanings, along with periphrastic clausal negation and someauxiliary verbs.^[4]: 8–9

Tundra Nenets contains a few nominalderivational affixes that can be used to denote a cause, express an instrument, or refer to a location of action. For example, the nounxərwa-bco 'wish' can be derived from the verbxərwa- 'to want'.^[4]: 31 There are also several mixed categories of nouns that have a syntactic distribution of a different word class, yet share other properties with nouns. For example, the proprietive suffix-sawey° can be used to derive nouns with the meaning 'with X, having X', as inyī-sawey° 'intelligent' (fromyī 'mind').^[4]: 32

Tundra Nenets has two verbalaspectual classes, perfective and imperfective. There are several derivational aspectual suffixes which can change the aspectual class of a verb. For example, imperfectivizing suffixes can be used to express durative, frequentative, multiplicative, and iterative meanings, such as intola-bə 'to keep counting' (fromtola- 'to count').^[4]: 45 There are also denominal verbs with the meaning 'to use as X, to have as X', which are formed from the accusative plural stem, such as insəb'i-q' 'to use as a hat' (fromsəwa 'hat').^[4]: 46

Nouns areinflected fornumber (singular, dual, plural),case (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative, prolative), and possessive, which can indicate the person and number of the possessor.^[4]: 9 For example, the following noun is inflected for similative case and third person plural number.

The dual forms are only used in the grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive). In non-possessive constructions, the dual suffix is -x°h, and -xəyu- in possessive constructions, followed by the possessive affixes.^[14]

The plural paradigm is as follows:^[15]

Verbs are inflected foragreement,tense, andmood. Present tense is unmarked, but Tundra Nenets distinguishes inflectionally the past, future, habitual, and future-in-the-past tenses. There are sixteen moods, which include theimperative,hortative,optative,conjunctive,necessitative,interrogative, probabilitative, obligative, potential, and inferential.^[4]: 9 For example, the verb below is inflected for subjunctive mood, first person singular agreement, and past tense.

Clitics undergo the same phonological processes and stress assignment as affixes. They can attach to an affirmative finite verb, a negative auxiliary, or a non-verbal final predicate, and follow any other inflection,^[4]: 116 as shown with the following exclamative clitic:^[4]: 117

Particles are primarily used for discourse. Common particles includeyekar°q 'it is unknown',ŋod'°q 'hardly',tǣr'i 'just, very', andməs'iq 'maybe, perhaps.'^[4]: 53 An example is given below:

There are some lexical noun-nouncompounds in Tundra Nenets. As shown in the following example, the first element in the compound can always be modified and take a number.^[4]: 167

A few irregular verbs showsuppletion. The most frequent suppletive verbs arexǣ- 'to go, to depart',ŋǣ- 'to be',to- 'to come',ta- 'to bring, to give' and the negative auxiliarynʹi-. Some common suppletive forms for these verbs are given in the table below.^[4]: 25

Tundra Nenets is predominantly a head-final SOV language.^[4]: 9 Verb finality is the primary constraint on word order.^[4]: 213 Below are examples of the basic word order for a transitive and intransitive sentence.

However, although most simple sentences have SOV order, a more general trend is for the informationally new element to be immediately preverbal and to be preceded by the informationally old element. So, it is possible to have sentences where the direct object precedes the subject,^[4]: 214 as illustrated below:

The possessor precedes the thing being possessed.^[4]: 142

Comparative adjectives follow their standards, which take the ablative case.^[4]: 174

The determiner precedes the noun phrase.^{[4]: 141–142}

(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

• Jalava, Lotta (2017). "Grammaticalization of modality and evidentiality in Tundra Nenets". In Hengeveld, Kees; Narrog, Heiko; Olbertz, Hella (eds.).The Grammaticalization of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality: A Functional Perspective. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs. Vol. 311. Berlin: De Gruyter.doi:10.1515/9783110519389.ISBN 978-3-11-051938-9.

Tundra Nenets language test ofWikipedia atWikimedia Incubator

For a list of words relating to Tundra Nenets language, see theTundra Nenets language category of words inWiktionary, the free dictionary.

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• Indigenous languages of Siberia

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