Mednyj Aleut (also called Copper Island
Creole or Copper Island Aleut
) is an extinct mixed language spoken on
Bering Island
Bering Island (russian: о́стров Бе́ринга, ''ostrov Beringa'') is located off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea.
Description
At long by wide, it is the largest and westernmost of the Commander Islands, with an area of . ...
.
Mednyj Aleut is characterized by a blending of
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
and
Aleut
The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...
(primarily
Attu) elements in most components of the grammar, but most profoundly in the verbal morphology.
The Aleut component comprises the majority of the vocabulary, all the derivational morphology, part of the simple sentence syntax, nominal inflection and certain other grammatical means. The Russian components comprise verbal inflection, negation, infinitive forms, part of the simple sentence syntax and all of the compound sentence syntax.
History
Originally, the language was spoken by
Alaskan Creoles on
Copper Island
Copper Island is a local name given to the northern part of the Keweenaw Peninsula (projecting northeastward into Lake Superior at the western end of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, United States of America), separated from the rest of the Kewe ...
, from where it takes its name. The Alaskan Creoles are the descendants of ''
promyshlenniki
The ''promyshlenniki'' (russian: промышленники, singular form: russian: промышленник, translit=promyshlennik), were Russian and indigenous Siberian artel- or self-employed workers drawn largely from the state serf and ...
'' men employed by the
Russian-American Company
The Russian-American Company Under the High Patronage of His Imperial Majesty (russian: Под высочайшим Его Императорского Величества покровительством Российская-Американс ...
(RAC) and
Aleut
The Aleuts ( ; russian: Алеуты, Aleuty) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands, which are located between the North Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. Both the Aleut people and the islands are politically divided between the ...
and
Alutiiq
The Alutiiq people (pronounced in English; from Promyshlenniki Russian Алеутъ, "Aleut"; plural often "Alutiit"), also called by their ancestral name ( or ; plural often "Sugpiat"), as well as Pacific Eskimo or Pacific Yupik, are a so ...
women, and formed a small but influential population in
Russian Alaska
Russian America (russian: Русская Америка, Russkaya Amerika) was the name for the Russian Empire's colonial possessions in North America from 1799 to 1867. It consisted mostly of present-day Alaska in the United States, but a ...
. They were bilingual in Russian and Aleut, and were defined as a high-status special social group by the RAC.
Due to increased contact with the Russian language in the 1940s, the majority of the population switched to using Russian instead of Mednyj Aleut. In 1970, the entire population of Medny Island was moved to Bering Island. As of 2022, it is spoken by two elderly speakers in
Nikolskoe (Bering Island).
[Эскимосско-алеутские языки](_blank)
Languages of Russia project. Institute of Linguistics RAS
Phonology
Consonants
Mednyj Aleut's consonant inventory mostly consists of phonemes shared between Aleut and Russian. The
aspirated sonorants
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 are ...
/m
h/, /n
h/, /l
h/ and /j
h/, and the
uvulars
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not pro ...
/χ/ and /ʁ/, come from Aleut and do not exist in Russian, while the
labials,
stops /p/ and /b/, and
fricatives
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 ...
/f/ and /v/ come from Russian and do not exist in Aleut. Labials are mostly used in words of Russian origin, while aspirated sonorants are used only in native Aleut words.
Vowels
The vowel inventory of Mednyj Aleut contains three pairs of vowels from Aleut (/i/, /u/, /a/) and two pairs, /o/ and /e/, from Russian. Vowel length is preserved in Aleut loanwords, and vowels are also lengthened in the verbal inflectional endings borrowed from Russian.
Syntax
Mednyj Aleut has a heavily Russian-influenced syntax. In particular, it has a relatively free word order in comparison to Aleut, which is strictly
SOV. However, when the
direct object
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include but ...
in a sentence is a
personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
or when an
adjunct in a sentence is an Aleut word, SOV word order is used.
Russian
complementizers,
conjunctions and many
wh-words are also used:
Additionally, negation is similar to Russian: the Russian prefix is used as the negative suffix and the phrase / ('there is no') is used as a special negative existential construction.
Like Russian, Mednyj Aleut does not use
copulas in the
present tense
The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present ...
. The verb 'to be' is the Aleut word 'u-', but Russian verbal inflections are used for it. For example, 'uu-it' means 'is' and 'uu-l-i' means 'were'. The copula is only used in past tense when the predicate is nominal. When the predicate is adjectival, the predicate is inflected for the past tense like a verb is.
Morphology
Nouns
The derivational and inflectional morphology of nouns in Mednyj Aleut comes from Aleut. Notably, Mednyj Aleut contains morphological categories that do not exist in Russian, such as
duality. 61.5% of nouns in Mednyj Aleut are of Aleut origin, with the rest coming from Russian.
Verbs
The finite, infinitive and the majority of the nonfinite forms of verbs is of Russian origin while the nominal inflectional morphology is of Aleut origin. For example, this table compares selected finite verb forms for the verb 'to work' between the Bering Island dialect of Aleut, Mednyj Aleut and Russian. The Russian-origin influences are added to the verb stem, which is of Aleut origin.
94% of verbs in the Mednyj Aleut lexicon are of Aleut origin, with a minority coming from Russian. Mednyj Aleut is characterized as considerably more
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
than Russian, which is generally considered
fusional
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
For e ...
.
See also
*
Chinook Jargon
*
Haida Jargon
In the 1830s a pidgin trade language based on Haida, known as Haida Jargon, was used in the islands by speakers of English, Haida, Coast Tsimshian, and Heiltsuk.Lyle Campbell (1997) ''American Indian Languages'', p. 24
See also
* Nootka Jargon ...
*
Kyakhta Russian–Chinese Pidgin
*
Ninilchik
Ninilchik (russian: Нинильчик) (Denaʼina language, Dena'ina: ''Niqnalchint'') is a census-designated place (CDP) in Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Alaska, United States. At the 2010 United States Census, 2010 c ...
*
Nootka Jargon
Nootka Jargon or Nootka Lingo was a pidginized form of the Wakashan language Nuučaan̓uł, used for trade purposes by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, when communicating with persons who did not share any common language. ...
*
Russenorsk
Russenorsk (; russian: Руссено́рск, ; en, Russo-Norwegian) is an extinct dual-source "restricted pidgin" language formerly used in the Arctic, which combined elements of Russian and Norwegian. Russenorsk originated from Russian tr ...
Citations
Sources
*http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/ls/art?id=981
*
* (15 fluent speakers in the late 1980s.)
*http://archives.conlang.info/so/gentua/vonjhuanjhian.html
{{Eskimo-Aleut languages
Languages of Russia
Russian language varieties and styles
Mixed languages
Aleut language
North America Native-based pidgins and creoles
Russian-based pidgins and creoles
Commander Islands