Southern Khanty is a
Uralic language
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...
, frequently considered a dialect of a unified
Khanty language
Khanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (), is a branch of the Ugric languages composed of multiple dialect continuum, dialect continua. It is varyingly considered a language or a collection of distinct languages spoken i ...
, spoken by 56 people in 2010.
It is considered to be extinct,
its speakers having shifted starting in the 18th century to
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
or
Siberian Tatar
Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states sin ...
,
but some speakers of the Kyshikov or Ust-Nazym dialect
were found in its former territory. Speakers of Surgut Khanty have moved into the former territory of the Demyanka dialect. It was transitional between the
Northern Khanty and
Eastern Khanty dialect groups, but it is now a distinct language.
Classification
Southern and Northern Khanty share various innovations and can be grouped together as Western Khanty. These include loss of full front rounded vowels: *üü, *öö, *ɔ̈ɔ̈ > *ii, *ee, *ää (but *ɔ̈ɔ̈ > *oo adjacent to *k, *ŋ), loss of vowel harmony, fricativization of *k to /x/ adjacent to back vowels, and the loss of the *ɣ phoneme.
Dialects
Dialects of Southern Khanty:
* Upper
Demjanka, Lower Demjanka,
Konda, Cingali, Krasnojarsk
See also
*
Southern Mansi language
References
Sources
*
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{{Uralic languages
Khanty language
Indigenous languages of Siberia