Khanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (), is a branch of the
Ugric languages
The Ugric or Ugrian languages ( or ) are a branch of the Uralic language family.
Ugric includes three subgroups: Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. The latter two are traditionally considered to be single languages, though they are sometimes c ...
composed of multiple
dialect continua
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated variet ...
. It is varyingly considered a language or a collection of distinct languages spoken in the
Khanty-Mansi and the
Yamalo-Nenets
The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (; ) also known as Yamalia () is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia and an autonomous okrugs of Russia, autonomous okrug of Tyumen Oblast. Its administrative center is the types of inhabite ...
Autonomous Okrugs in
Siberia
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 ...
. It belongs to the wider
Uralic
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 abo ...
language family. There were thought to be around 7,500 speakers of
Northern Khanty and 2,000 speakers of
Eastern Khanty in 2010, with
Southern Khanty being extinct since the early 20th century. The number of speakers reported in the 2020 census was 13,900.
The Khanty language has many
dialect
A dialect is a Variety (linguistics), variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standard language, standardized varieties as well as Vernacular language, vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardize ...
s. The western group includes the
Obdorian,
Ob, and
Irtysh
The Irtysh is a river in Russia, China, and Kazakhstan. It is the chief tributary of the Ob (river), Ob and is also the longest tributary in the world.
The river's source lies in the Altai Mountains, Mongolian Altai in Dzungaria (the northern p ...
dialects. The eastern group includes the
Surgut
Surgut ( rus, Сургу́т, p=sʊrˈgut; Khanty: Сәрханӆ, ''Sərhanł, Сө̆ркут, sörkut'') is a city in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia, located on the Ob River near its junction with the Irtysh River. It is one of the fe ...
and
Vakh
The Vakh () is a river in Khanty–Mansia, Russia. It is a right tributary of the Ob. The Vakh is long with a basin area of .
The river is a status B Ramsar wetland, nominated for designation as a Wetland of International Importance in 2000. ...
-
Vasyugan
The Vasyugan () is a river in the southern West Siberian Plain of Russia. It is a tributary of the Ob on the left side, and its course from its source in the Vasyugan Swamp is entirely within the Kargasok district of Tomsk Oblast.
Statistic ...
dialects, which in turn are subdivided into 13 other dialects. All these dialects differ significantly from each other by
phonetic
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
,
morphological, and
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lexical ...
features to the extent that the three main "dialects" (northern, southern and eastern) are mutually unintelligible. Thus, based on their significant multifactorial differences, Eastern, Northern and Southern Khanty may be considered separate but closely-related languages.
Literary languages
The Khanty
written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is ...
was first created after the
October Revolution
The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...
on the basis of the
Latin script
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
in 1930 and then with the
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...
(with the additional letter for ) from 1937.
Khanty
literary
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, ...
works are usually written in three Northern dialects,
Kazym,
Shuryshkar and Middle Ob. Newspaper reporting and broadcasting are usually done in the Kazym dialect.
Varieties

Khanty is divided in three main dialect groups, which are largely
mutually unintelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...
and therefore best considered three languages: Northern, Southern and Eastern. Individual dialects are named after the rivers on which they are or were spoken. Southern Khanty is now probably extinct.
Phonology
A general feature of all Khanty varieties is that
long vowels are not distinguished, but a contrast between plain vowels (e.g. ) and reduced or extra-short vowels (e.g. ) is found. That corresponds to an actual length distinction in Khanty's close relative,
Mansi
Mansi may refer to:
* Mansi people, an Indigenous people of Russia
** Mansi language
*Mansi (name), given name and surname
*Mansi Junction railway station
* Mansi Township, Myanmar
** Mansi, Myanmar, a town in the Kachin State of Myanmar (Burma)
* ...
. According to scholars who posit a common
Ob-Ugric ancestry for both, that was also the original Proto-Ob-Ugric situation.
Palatalization
Palatalization may refer to:
*Palatalization (phonetics), the phonetic feature of palatal secondary articulation
*Palatalization (sound change)
Palatalization ( ) is a historical-linguistic sound change that results in a palatalized articulati ...
of consonants is phonemic in Khanty, as in most other Uralic languages.
Retroflex consonant
A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...
s are also found in most varieties of Khanty.
Khanty word stress is usually on the initial syllable.
Proto-Khanty
The 19 consonants reconstructed for Proto-Khanty are listed with the traditional
UPA transcription, shown above, and an
IPA transcription, shown below.
A major consonant isogloss among the Khanty varieties is the reflexation of the lateral consonants, *ɬ (from Proto-Uralic *s and *š) and *l (from Proto-Uralic *l and *ð). These generally merge, however with varying results: /l/ in the Obdorsk and Far Eastern dialects, /ɬ/ in the Kazym and Surgut dialects, and /t/ elsewhere. The Vasjugan dialect still retains the distinction word-initially and instead has shifted *ɬ > /j/ in this position. Similarly, the palatalized lateral *ľ developed to /lʲ/ in Far Eastern and Obdorsk, /ɬʲ/ in Kazym and Surgut, and /tʲ/ elsewhere. The retroflex lateral *ḷ remains in Far Eastern but in /t/-dialects develop into a new plain /l/.
Other dialect isoglosses include the development of original *ć to a palatalized stop /tʲ/ in Eastern and Southern Khanty but to a palatalized sibilant /sʲ ~ ɕ/ in Northern, as well as the development of original *č similarly to a sibilant /ʂ/ (= UPA: ) in Northern Khanty and partly also in Southern Khanty.
Grammar
The noun
The nominal suffixes include
dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual number, a nu ...
',
plural
In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
',
dative
In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...
',
locative
In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and " ...
/
instrumental
An instrumental or instrumental song is music without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through Semantic change, semantic widening, a broader sense of the word s ...
'.
For example:
:''xot'' "house" (cf.
Finnish ''koti'' "home", or Hungarian ''ház'')
:''xotŋəna'' "to the two houses"
:''xotətnə'' "at the houses" (cf.
Hungarian ''otthon'', Finnish ''kotona'' "at home", an exceptional form using the old, locative meaning of the essive case ending -na).
Singular, dual, and plural possessive suffixes may be added to singular, dual, and plural nouns, in three persons, for 3
3 = 27 forms. A few, from ''məs'' "cow", are:
:''məsem'' "my cow"
:''məsemən'' "my two cows"
:''məsew'' "my cows"
:''məstatən'' "the two of our cows"
:''məsŋətuw'' "our two cows"
Cases
#
Nominative case
In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants ...
#
Accusative case
In grammar, the accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "he ...
#
Dative case
In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this examp ...
#
Lative case
In grammar, the lative ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates motion to a location. It corresponds to the English prepositions "to" and "into". The lative case belongs to the group of the general local cases together with the loc ...
, merger of differentiated local cases that is used to indicate relative location.
#
Locative case
In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and ...
Used to indicate place and direction.
#
Ablative case
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make ...
, external case used to mean moving away from something.
#
Approximative case, used to indicate a path towards.
#
Translative case
In grammar, the translative case ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical case
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more pot ...
, used to indicate transformation.
#
Instructive case (related to Instrumental case), as in something is an instrument for an action.
#
Comitative case
In grammar, the comitative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role. Other uses of "with", l ...
, used to indicate that something is with (accompanying) X.
#
Abessive case
In linguistics, abessive (abbreviated or ), caritive (abbreviated ) and privative (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case expressing the lack or absence of the marked noun. In English, the corresponding function is expressed by the preposition '' ...
, used to indicate that something is without x.
Pronouns
The personal pronouns are, in the nominative case:
The cases of ''ma'' are accusative ''manət'' and dative ''manəm''.
The demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are:
:''tamə'' "this", ''tomə'' "that", ''sit'' "that yonder": ''tam xot'' "this house".
Basic interrogative pronouns are:
:''xoy'' "who?", ''muy'' "what?"
Numerals
Khanty numerals, compared with
Hungarian and
Finnish, are:
The formation of multiples of ten shows Slavic influence in Khanty, whereas Hungarian uses the collective derivative suffix ''-van (-ven)'' closely related to the suffix of the
adverbial participle
In linguistics, a participle (; abbr. ) is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adject ...
which is ''-va (-ve)'' today but used to be ''-ván (-vén)''. Note also the regularity of "house" and "hundred".
Nomen
Pronouns
Morphology
Verbs
Khanty verbs must agree with the subject in person and number. There are two paradigms for conjugation. One has the verb agree only with the subject (subjective conjugation column in the verbal suffixes table), and one has the verb agree with both the subject and the object (objective conjugation in the same table). In a sentence with both a subject and an object, the subjective conjugation puts the object in focus. A sentence with the objective conjugation puts the object as a topic.

Khanty has present and past tenses, indicative and imperative moods and passive and active voices.
Generally, the present tense is marked, and the past is unmarked, but some verbs distinguish the present from the past by
changing vowels or
adding consonants.
The order of suffixes is always tense-(passive.)number-person.
The on-finite verb forms are the infinitive, the converb and four participle verb forms. Infinitive can complement a modal verb or a motion verb such as go. If it is alone, necessity or possibility is meant.
The participles are present, past, negative and conditional. The first two are in use, and the last two are now scarcely used.
Questions
Yes/no questions are marked only by intonation. Indirect yes/no questions are constructed with “or” : S/he asked if Misha was tired
r not
Wh-questions most often contain a <
Negation
Negation is marked by the particle ''əntə'', which appears adjacent to the verb and between the particles of particle verbs. That is different from other Uralic languages, which tend to have a negation verb or at least a negation particle that is inflected in some way.
Syntax
Both Khanty and Mansi
Mansi may refer to:
* Mansi people, an Indigenous people of Russia
** Mansi language
*Mansi (name), given name and surname
*Mansi Junction railway station
* Mansi Township, Myanmar
** Mansi, Myanmar, a town in the Kachin State of Myanmar (Burma)
* ...
are basically nominative–accusative languages but have innovative morphological ergativity. In an ergative construction, the object is given the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb, and the locative
In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and " ...
is used for the agent of the transitive verb (as an instrumental
An instrumental or instrumental song is music without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through Semantic change, semantic widening, a broader sense of the word s ...
). That may be used with some specific verbs such as for "to give", the literal translation would be "by me (subject) a fish (object) gave to you (indirect object)" for the equivalent of the sentence "I gave you a fish".
However, the ergative, since it is marked by using a case, is only morphological, not syntactic. In addition, it may be used in the passive voice in a way that resembles English. For example, in Mansi
Mansi may refer to:
* Mansi people, an Indigenous people of Russia
** Mansi language
*Mansi (name), given name and surname
*Mansi Junction railway station
* Mansi Township, Myanmar
** Mansi, Myanmar, a town in the Kachin State of Myanmar (Burma)
* ...
, the equivalent of "a dog (agent) bit you (object)" may be changed to "you (object) were bitten, by a dog (instrument)".
Khanty, an agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations) ...
, has an SOV word order SOV may refer to:
* SOV, a former ticker symbol for Sovereign Bank
* SOV, a legal cryptocurrency created by the Sovereign Currency Act of 2018 of the Republic of the Marshall Islands
* SOV, the National Rail station code for Southend Victoria rail ...
.
Word order
On the phrasal level, the traditional relations are typical for an OV language. For example, prepositional phrases
An adpositional phrase is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or circumposition) as ...
may be after the verb, manner adverbs are after verbs, verb phrases precedes auxiliaries and the possessor precedes the possessed.
On the sentence level, case alignment in Surgut Khanty clauses follows a nominative-accusative pattern. Both the subject and the object may be dropped if they are pragmatically inferable, possible even in the same sentence.
Khanty is usually a verb-final language, but about 10% of sentences have other phrases after the verb. The word order in matrix clauses is more variable but is quite strict in embedded clauses. Those constraints are caused by grammatical relations and discourse information. Those phrases used to havee content that was already introduced in the discourse. However, newly-introduced content may now be placed after the verb as well. Schön and Gugán speculate that to be caused by contact Russian.
Imperative
Imperative clauses have the same structure as declarative sentences, apart from complex predicates, whose verb may precede the preverb. Prohibitive sentences include a prohibitive particle.
Passive
The passive voice is achieved by moving phrases other than the subject into the subject position to focus on the agent its indefiniteness.
Pro-drop
Nouns or pronouns may be dropped only if they are obvious from the context and marked by the verb.
Lexicon
The Khanty varieties have a relatively well-documented lexicon. The most extensive early source is Toivonen (1948), based on field records by K. F. Karjalainen from 1898 to 1901. An etymological interdialectal dictionary, covering all known material from pre-1940 sources, is Steinitz et al. (1966–1993).
Schiefer (1972) summarizes the etymological sources of Khanty vocabulary, as per Steinitz et al., as follows:
Futaky (1975) additionally proposes a number of loanwords from the 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 ...
, mainly Evenki.
Notes
References
*
*
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*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Holmberg, A., Nikanne, U., Oraviita, I., Reime, H., & Trosterud, T. (1993). The structure of INFL and the finite clause in Finnish. ''Case and other functional categories in Finnish syntax'', ''39'', 177
External links
Khanty Language
Documentation of Eastern Khanty
Khanty basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Khanty Language and People
Khanty–Russian Russian–Khanty dictionary (download)
mirror
(in case the PDF link gets misdirected)
OLAC resources in and about the Khanty language
{{Authority control
Languages of Russia
Uralic languages
Vowel-harmony languages
Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug
Culture of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
Subject–object–verb languages
Agglutinative languages