The Udege language (also Udihe language, Udekhe language, Udeghe language) is the language of the Udege people. It is a member of the Tungusic family.

History

Previously an oral language, in 1931 an alphabet was created for writing Udege as a part of

latinisation in the Soviet Union In the USSR, latinisation or latinization (russian: латиниза́ция, ') was the name of the campaign during the 1920s–1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for all languages of the Soviet Union with systems that ...

. In 1938 the policy of latinisation was reversed and the written Udige language was banned by Soviet authorities. Books in Udihe were collected and burned. , an Udige language author and translator was declared an

enemy of the people The term enemy of the people or enemy of the nation, is a designation for the political or class opponents of the subgroup in power within a larger group. The term implies that by opposing the ruling subgroup, the "enemies" in question are ac ...

and executed.

Vocabulary

Udege contains a variety of loanwords from the closely related

Nanai language The Nanai language (also called Gold, Goldi, or Hezhen) is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe. The language has about 1,400 speakers out of 17,000 ethn ...

, which have supplanted some older Udege vocabulary, such as: * anixe(thank you), from Nanai anixa instead of Udege sasa!-- are these also IPA?--> * (work), from Nanai , instead of Udege * (book) from Nanai , itself a loanword from zh, 檔子 (

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

: ), which actually means "file, records, archives" In general, a large degree of mutual assimilation of the two languages has been observed in the

Bikin Bikin (russian: Бики́н) is a town in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia, located on the river Bikin (a tributary of the Ussuri) southwest of Khabarovsk. Population: 19,000 (1967). History It was founded in 1885 as Bikinskaya and was granted town s ...

region. Udege has also exerted phonological influence on the

dialect of Nanai, including monophthongisation of

diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...

s, denasalisation of nasal vowels, deletion of reduced final vowels, epenthetic vowels preventing consonant final words, and the deletion of intervocalic

Orthography

Udege is currently written in two versions of the Cyrillic alphabet, known as the "Petersburg" and the "Khabarovsk" versions. The Khabarovsk version is used more often. A few older letters that were used in this language: Ж ж, З з, Љ љ, Ц ц, Ш ш, Щ щ, Ъ ъ, Ы ы, ‘Ы ‘ы, Ы̄ ы̄, Ы̂ ы̂, Ю ю, ‘Ю ‘ю, Ю̄ ю̄, Ю̂ ю̂, Я я, ‘Я ‘я, Я̄ я̄, Я̂ я̂

Phonology

Examples

The beginning of the fairy tale "Selemege":

Notes

Bibliography

* * *

External links

Chukchi fairy tales in Udihe (Udehe) and English
* Максим Руссо
Карта языков России: удэгейский
( Полит.ру, 10 марта 2019) {{DEFAULTSORT:Udege Language Agglutinative languages Critically endangered languages Khabarovsk Krai Languages of Russia Tungusic languages