Nganasan is the most divergent language of theSamoyedic branch of theUralic language family (Janhunen 1998). There are two maindialects, Avam (авамский говор,avamsky govor) and Vadeyev (Russian:вадеевский говор,romanized: vadeyevsky govor). 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 asNenets orEnets, and bear no apparent resemblance to the neighboringTungusic andYukaghir 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-extinctPaleo-Siberian language once spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula, which was later supplanted by Nganasan.[6]
Several disyllabic sequences of vowels are possible:
Second Vowel
High
Mid
Low
High First Vowel
i-
ii
iə
ia
y-
yy
yə
ya
ɨ-
ɨɨ
ɨə
ɨa
u-
uu
uə
ua
Non-High First Vowel
-i
-y
-u
-ə
-a
e-
ei
ey
ə-
əi
əy
əu
əə
o-
oi
ou
oa
a-
ai
ay
au
aa
The sequences /ⁱai/ and /iu/ also occur, but only across morpheme boundaries.[9]
The vowels/e/ and/o/ only occur in initial syllables.[9][8]
Vowels can be divided two pairs of groups based on harmony: front/ⁱaeiy/ vs back/aoɨu/, and unrounded/ⁱaeiɨ/ vs rounded/aoyu/. Backness harmony only applies to high vowels.[9]
Front vowels do not occur after initial dental consonants.[7]
/əɨu/ do not occur after palatal consonants, as they have fronted to/eiy/, although the first of these only happens in word-initial syllables.[7]
/ⁱa/ does not occur after palatal consonants, having been neutralized into/a/.[7]
/o/ does not occur after labial consonants, having unrounded to/ə/ in this position.[7]
One of the main features of Nganasan isconsonant gradation, which concerns the consonantphonemes/h,t,k,s/ alternating with/b,d,g,ɟ/ and their nasal combinations/ŋh,nt,ŋk,ns/ with/mb,nd,ŋg,ɲɟ/.[7]
Nouns in Nganasan have the grammatical categories ofnumber (singular, dual, plural),case (nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, elative, prolative, comitative) andpossessivity (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.[11]
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 postpositionna-. Other pronouns are inflected like nouns (Helimski, 1998).
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.
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.
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).
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).
The dominating word order in Nganasan issubject-object-verb (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).
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 thanni-, such askasa — "nearly",ləði — "vainly",əku — "maybe", andŋuəli — "of course", but their functionality is restricted, with onlyni- having a full paradigm.
Existential sentences are negated with the negative existential predicated'aŋku or its derivative stemd'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 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 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).
Compulsory education did not exist for Nganasans until the 1930s. They were therefore mostly illiterate until then. Not many Nganasans spoke Russian; spoken Russian would generally not be in standard Russian. Rather, it would be a pidgin calledTaimyr Pidgin Russian or Govorka.
The first school was founded inDudinka 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 toRussify the population, but also due to the fact that 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. TheUst'ye Avam pupils no longer have this class, as their school closed after it burned down in 2012.[12]
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",[13] a part of theVGTRK), 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, theTaimyr newspaper [Wikidata] (renamed fromSovetsky Taimyr following the end of theCPSU andabolition of asystem of government called aSoviet republic) has been irregularly publishing news and other stories in Nganasan.[12]
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.ISBN9789027268648.
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.
Katzschmann, Michael; Labanauskas, Kazis I. (2008).Chrestomathia Nganasanica: Texte - Übersetzung - Glossar - Grammatik ; Bearbeitung der "Nganasanskaja folʹklornaja chrestomatija", zusammengestellt von Kazis I. Labanauskas unter Berücksichtigung des "Slovarʹ nganasansko-russkij i russko-nganasanskij". Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH.ISBN978-3-8370-1121-0.
Kortt, I. R.; Simčenko, Ju. B. (1985).Wörterverzeichnis der Nganasanischen Sprache. Berlin: Systemata Mundi.ISBN3-925500-00-6.
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.ISBN963-482-588-5.
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.
^abWagner-Nagy, Beáta (2019).A grammar of Nganasan. Grammars and language sketches of the world's languages. Leiden Boston: Brill.ISBN978-90-04-38275-6., Chapter 1:Introduction
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