Nivkh (; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, ''Nivxgu dif'', ), or Gilyak (), or Amuric, is a small
language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in hist ...
, often portrayed as a
language isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages
spoken by the
Nivkh people
The Nivkh, or Gilyak (also Nivkhs or Nivkhi, or Gilyaks; ethnonym: Нивхгу, ''Nʼivxgu'' (Amur) or Ниғвңгун, ''Nʼiɣvŋgun'' (E. Sakhalin) "the people"), are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Island ...
in
Outer Manchuria
Outer Manchuria (russian: Приаму́рье, translit=Priamurye; zh, s=外满洲, t=外滿洲, p=Wài Mǎnzhōu), or Outer Northeast China ( zh, s=外东北, t=外東北, p=Wài Dōngběi), refers to a territory in Northeast Asia that is now ...
, in the basin of the
Amgun
The Amgun () is a river in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia that flows northeast and joins the river Amur from the left, 146 km upstream from its outflow into sea. The length of the river is . The area of its basin is . The Amgun is formed by the co ...
(a tributary of the
Amur
The Amur (russian: река́ Аму́р, ), or Heilong Jiang (, "Black Dragon River", ), is the world's List of longest rivers, tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeast China, Northeastern China (Inne ...
), along the lower reaches of the
Amur
The Amur (russian: река́ Аму́р, ), or Heilong Jiang (, "Black Dragon River", ), is the world's List of longest rivers, tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeast China, Northeastern China (Inne ...
itself, and on the northern half of
Sakhalin
Sakhalin ( rus, Сахали́н, r=Sakhalín, p=səxɐˈlʲin; ja, 樺太 ''Karafuto''; zh, c=, p=Kùyèdǎo, s=库页岛, t=庫頁島; Manchu: ᠰᠠᡥᠠᠯᡳᠶᠠᠨ, ''Sahaliyan''; Orok: Бугата на̄, ''Bugata nā''; Nivkh: ...
. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the
Amur River
The Amur (russian: река́ Аму́р, ), or Heilong Jiang (, "Black Dragon River", ), is the world's List of longest rivers, tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeast China, Northeastern China (Inne ...
region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. That may have been an overcount, however, as the 2010 census recorded only 198 native speakers, less than 4% of the ethnic population.
Proto-Nivkh(ic), the
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattest ...
ancestral to the modern-day languages, has been reconstructed by
Fortescue
Fortescue may refer to:
People
* Fortescue (surname), a British surname ''Includes list of name-holders''
* Fortescue Ash (1882–1956), Anglican bishop in Australia
* Fortescue Graham (1794–1880), British Royal Marines general
Places
* Fo ...
(2016).
Languages
Nivkh is a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...
. There is a high degree of variability of usage among Nivkhs depending on village, clan, and even the individual speaker. Varieties are traditionally grouped into four geographic clusters. These are the lower-Amur variety, the North Sakhalin variety (spoken on the coasts around the
Amur Liman
The Amur Liman is a liman of the Amur River, the northern part of the Strait of Tartary between Eurasia and Sakhalin. It connects the Sakhalin Gulf of the Sea of Okhotsk with the main body of the Strait of Tartary via the Nevelskoy Strait.
"A ...
, including the mainland and west Sakhalin), the East Sakhalin variety (including populations around the
Tymy River
The Tym (russian: Тымь) is a river on the island of Sakhalin, Russia, and the second longest river on the island after the Poronay. It is long, and has a drainage basin of . The name of the river is translated from Nivkh as "spawning rive ...
), and the South Sakhalin variety (spoken around the
Poronay River
The Poronay (russian: Поронай, ja, 幌内川) is the longest river on the island of Sakhalin in Russia. It flows in a southerly direction through Tym, Smirnykhovsky and Poronaysky Districts.
Geography
The river begins on Mt. Nevel in th ...
). The lexical and phonological differences across these varieties is great enough that specialists describe them as falling into two or three languages, though for purposes of language revival among a small and already divided population, Nivkh is generally presented as a single language, due to fears of the consequences of further division.
Gruzdeva (1998) notes that speakers of East Sakhalin and the lower Amur cannot understand each other, and divides the varieties into two languages, Nivkh proper (including the lower Amur, Northern Sakhalin / Straits and Western Sakhalin varieties) and Nighvng (the East and South Sakhalin varieties). Fortescue (2016)
notes that the Amur, East Sakhalin and South Sakhalin varieties have low intelligibility with each other, and considers each of them to constitute a separate language.
Classification
Nivkh is not known to be related to any other language, making it an
isolated family. For convenience, it may be included in the geographical group of
Paleosiberian languages
Paleosiberian (or Paleo-Siberian) languages or Paleoasian (Paleo-Asiatic) (from , "ancient") are several linguistic isolates and small families of languages spoken in parts of northeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. They are not known ...
. Many words in the Nivkh languages bear a certain resemblance to words of similar meaning in other
Paleosiberian languages
Paleosiberian (or Paleo-Siberian) languages or Paleoasian (Paleo-Asiatic) (from , "ancient") are several linguistic isolates and small families of languages spoken in parts of northeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. They are not known ...
,
Ainu,
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
, or
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the doz ...
, but no regular sound correspondences have been discovered to systematically account for the vocabularies of these various families, so any lexical similarities are considered to be due to chance or to borrowing.
Michael Fortescue
Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946) is a British-born linguistics, linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Greenlandic language, Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi language, Chukchi and Nitinaht languag ...
suggested in 1998 that Nivkh might be related to the
Mosan languages
Mosan is a hypothetical language family consisting of the Salishan, Wakashan, and Chimakuan languages of the Pacific Northwest region of North America. It was proposed by Edward Sapir in 1929 in the ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Little evidence ...
of North America. Later, in 2011, he argued that Nivkh, which he referred to as an "isolated Amuric language", was related to the
Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan is endangered. The Kamchatkan ...
, forming a
Chukotko-Kamchatkan–Amuric language family. However, ''
Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...
'' considers the evidence to be "insufficient".
In 2015,
Sergei Nikolaev argued in two papers for a systematic relationship between Nivkh and the
Algic languages
The Algic languages (also Algonquian–Wiyot–Yurok or Algonquian–Ritwan) are an indigenous language family of North America. Most Algic languages belong to the Algonquian subfamily, dispersed over a broad area from the Rocky Mountains to ...
of North America, and a more distant relationship between these two together and the
Wakashan languages
Wakashan is a family of languages spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, and in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
As is typical of the Nort ...
of coastal
British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...
.
The Nivkh languages are included in the widely rejected
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia.
The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg's prop ...
hypothesis by
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on ...
.
An automated computational analysis (
ASJP
The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists ...
4) by Müller et al. (2013)
[Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ]
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. found lexical similarities among Nivkh,
Mongolic, and
Tungusic, likely due to lexical borrowings.
Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in gen ...
argued that Nivkh is related to
Uralo-Siberian and
Indo-Uralic
Indo-Uralic is a controversial hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European languages, Indo-European and Uralic languages, Uralic.
The suggestion of a genetic relationship (linguistics), genetic relationship between Indo-European a ...
: some evidences for the relationship are: Uralic participle *-pa and Nivkh gerund: *-pa. The pronouns *mi, *ti compared to Nivkh: n´i and či.
Hudson & Robbeets (2020) presumed that Nivkh-like language was once distributed in
Korea
Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...
and became the
substratum
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or sup ...
of
Koreanic languages
Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin suggests that the Yukjin dialect ...
.
Kim Bang-han
Kim Bang-han was a South Korean linguist. He proposed primitive Korean peninsula language theory. Primitive Korean peninsula language is a now-extinct non-Koreanic languages that some linguists believe were formerly spoken in central and southern ...
proposed that
placename glosses in the ''Samguk sagi'' reflect the original language of the Korean peninsula and a component in the formation of both Korean and Japanese. He proposed that this language was related to Nivkh.
Juha Janhunen
Juha Janhunen (born 12 February 1952 in Pori, Finland) is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994 he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork o ...
suggests the possibility that similar consonant stop systems in Koreanic and Nivkh may be due to ancient contact.
History
The
Nivkh people
The Nivkh, or Gilyak (also Nivkhs or Nivkhi, or Gilyaks; ethnonym: Нивхгу, ''Nʼivxgu'' (Amur) or Ниғвңгун, ''Nʼiɣvŋgun'' (E. Sakhalin) "the people"), are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Island ...
have lived, by many accounts for thousands of years, on the island of Sakhalin and the Amur River. They maintained trade with the neighboring Ainu, Japanese, and Chinese, until Russian contact, which began in the 17th century.
The 19th century shows the first recorded decline of Nivkh numbers, with official estimates dropping from 1856 to 1889. This coincided with smallpox epidemics and the expansion of Sakhalin's prisoner population, as Russia began sending groups of its convicts to Sakhalin in 1873. At this time, reportedly few Nivkh spoke Russian.
The official Russian census reported similar numbers of ethnic Nivkhs in 1897 (4,500) and in 2002 (5,200). However, the number of native speakers among the ethnic Nivkhs dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period. All recorded native Nivkh speakers were bilingual in Russian, most of them were born in 1920-1940
when a significant decline in the number of native Nivkh speakers occurred, due to Stalin's policy of collectivization imposed on indigenous economies,
and in many cases, driving Nivkh individuals to hired labor, marking a departure from traditional means of subsistence.
Many Nivkh were forcibly displaced from their more widely spread settlements to Nogliki, a small city, in the process of centralization. The traditional Nivkh way of life was gradually and sometimes forcibly converted to a Soviet way of life, as changes in subsistence, diet, dwellings, and education have resulted. In 2010s the Nivkh language is taught in the 1–3 grades in several schools in
Sakhalin
Sakhalin ( rus, Сахали́н, r=Sakhalín, p=səxɐˈlʲin; ja, 樺太 ''Karafuto''; zh, c=, p=Kùyèdǎo, s=库页岛, t=庫頁島; Manchu: ᠰᠠᡥᠠᠯᡳᠶᠠᠨ, ''Sahaliyan''; Orok: Бугата на̄, ''Bugata nā''; Nivkh: ...
and
Khabarovsk
Khabarovsk ( rus, Хабaровск, a=Хабаровск.ogg, r=Habárovsk, p=xɐˈbarəfsk) is the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative centre of Khabarovsk Krai, Russia,Law #109 located from the China ...
regions. A monthly newspaper "Nivkh dif" (Nivkh language) is published in Sakhalin. Nivkh language books are also regularly published in Russia.
Grammar
Nivkh is an agglutinating synthetic language. It has a developed case system, as well as other grammatical markers, but no grammatical gender. The basic word order of Nivkh is
subject–object–verb
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...
, the subject being frequently omitted in speech.
/sup>">/sup> Nivkh is notable for the high degree of incorporation between words. For example, morphemes that express spatial relationships (prepositions or postpositions in many other languages) are incorporated into the noun to which they relate. Words consist of easily definable roots and productive grammatical morphemes, most of which are suffixes. Nivkh has no adjectives, but rather verbs that describe a state of being. There are two verb tenses: non-future and future. The non-future form may combine with adverbials, as well as context, to indicate a time frame.
As Russian has become the dominant language in all spheres of life, Nivkh grammar has changed in the last century. For example, Nivkh has recently begun to mark plurals on counting nouns and pairs, a change that originated from the grammar rules of Russian. However, it has been postulated that due to the vastly differing grammatical structures of the two tongues, grammatical interference has not been extensive. Simplification has occurred past borrowed Russian structure, though; due to disuse of the language and a changing culture, many of the complex morphological aspects of Nivkh have been simplified or fallen out of use. In a process referred to as obsolescence, things like the distinction between the morpheme for counting sledges and the morpheme for counting fishnets has disappeared, with speakers opting to use more general categories of counting numbers or other descriptors.
Alphabet
Currently, the Nivkh language uses a modified
Cyrillic alphabet
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
. The sound values of each letter can be deduced from Omniglot and Tangiku's vocabulary list.
Letters in bold are only used in Russian loan words.
The letters Н and Т stands for two sounds each. When they are followed by a “soft” vowel letter, they produce the palatal consonant; otherwise they product an alveolar consonant. For example, , , , are written as ''та, тя, тъи, ти'' respectively. At the beginning of a word, or after Ъ or Ь, letters Ё, Ю, Я stands for , , .
The letters Ӷ and Ў are not used in the Amur dialect.
Phonology
Consonants
The labial fricatives are weakly articulated, and have been described as both
bilabial
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips.
Frequency
Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tli ...
and
labiodental
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants Place of articulation, articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.
Labiodental consonants in the IPA
The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
The IPA c ...
. The palatal stops may have some degree of affrication, as .
After nasals or , the unaspirated stops become voiced . Unlike consonant alternation, this occurs also within a morpheme. The Amur dialect deletes some word-final nasals, which leads to voiced stops occurring also word-initially.
Nivkh's
phonemic
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
distinction between velar and uvular fricatives ( vs. and vs. ) is rare among the world's languages. These sounds do occur in a great deal of languages, but usually they are
interchangeable.
Consonants are palatalized in some contexts, most commonly in younger speakers, where all consonants are palatalized before and . Additionally, there is another context in which consonants are always palatalised, viz. before when its preceding a uvular consonant , e.g. > ‘chicken’.
Nivkh features a process of
consonant alternation like in
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages ( usually , but sometimes ) are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward ...
, in which
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
-initial stops alternate with fricatives and trills:
This occurs when a morpheme is preceded by another morpheme within the same
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...
(e.g. a
prefix
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the Word stem, stem of a word. Adding it to the beginning of one word changes it into another word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy'' ...
or an
adjunct), unless the preceding morpheme ends itself in a fricative or trill, or in a nasal or .
* 'soup'
* 'duck soup'
* 'kind of seal soup'
* but: 'bear soup'
Only the morpheme-initial position is affected: other clusters ending in a stop are possible within a morpheme (e.g. "man").
In some
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transitiv ...
s, the process has been noted to apparently run in reverse (fricatives/trills fortiting to stops, with the same distribution). This has been taken a distinct process, but has also been explained to be fundamentally the same, with the
citation form
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' a ...
of these verbs containing an underlying stop, lenited due to the presence of a former ''i-'' prefix (which still survives in the citation form of other verbs, where it causes regular consonant alternation). Initial fricatives in nouns never change.
Vowels
There are these six
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s in Nivkh:
Long vowels are not a phonemic feature of Nivkh but can arise due to sentence prosody, or compensatory lengthening when fricatives are deleted after the vowel.
Stress
Stress can fall on any syllable, but tends to be on the first; there is dialectal variation, and minimal pairs distinguished by stress seem to be rare.
Language contact with the Ainu people
The
Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with the
Nivkhs
The Nivkh, or Gilyak (also Nivkhs or Nivkhi, or Gilyaks; ethnonym: Нивхгу, ''Nʼivxgu'' (Amur) or Ниғвңгун, ''Nʼiɣvŋgun'' (E. Sakhalin) "the people"), are an indigenous ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Islan ...
during the course of their history. It is not known to what extent this has affected the language. Linguists believe the vocabulary shared between the
Ainu language
Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...
and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of
Sakhalin
Sakhalin ( rus, Сахали́н, r=Sakhalín, p=səxɐˈlʲin; ja, 樺太 ''Karafuto''; zh, c=, p=Kùyèdǎo, s=库页岛, t=庫頁島; Manchu: ᠰᠠᡥᠠᠯᡳᠶᠠᠨ, ''Sahaliyan''; Orok: Бугата на̄, ''Bugata nā''; Nivkh: ...
and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to
borrowing.
See also
*
List of Proto-Nivkh reconstructions (Wiktionary)
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
Further reading
*
*
External links
The Nivkhsfrom
The Red Book
Sound Materials of the Nivkh LanguageThe World's Largest Sound Archive of the Nivkh Language on the Web
at Omniglot
Nivkh Folk Talkes
{{Eurasian languages
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
Agglutinative languages
Languages of Russia
Manchuria
Paleosiberian languages
Polysynthetic languages
Subject–object–verb languages
Language families