Enets is a
SamoyedicThe Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30,000 speakers altogether.The Samoyedic languages derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and together with the Finno-Ugric languages the Samoyedic languages form the...
language spoken by the Enets people along the lower
Yenisei RiverYenisei is the greatest river system flowing to the Arctic Ocean, and at 5,539 km is the fifth longest river in the world. Rising in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course to the Yenisei Gulf in the Kara Sea, draining a large part of central Siberia, the longest stream following the...
in
Krasnoyarsk KraiKrasnoyarsk Krai is a federal subject of Russia . It is the second largest federal subject after the Sakha Republic, occupying an area of , which is 13% of the country's total territory...
,
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. There are two distinct dialects - Forest Enets and Tundra Enets - which may be considered separate languages. There are only about seventy speakers in total, with slightly more speaking Forest Enets. Most speakers are middle-aged or older, and all speak
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
as a second language. It is closely related to
NenetsNenets is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia. It belongs to the Samoyedic languages which form the Uralic language family with the Finno-Ugric languages. There are two major dialects—Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets—with low mutual intelligibility between the two...
, which it was formerly regarded as a dialect of, and to
NganasanNganasan language is a language of the Nganasan people. It was spoken by 1,063 and by 750 people in the southwestern and central parts of the Taymyr Peninsula. The Nganasan language belongs to the northern Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family...
.
Orthography
Although an alphabet was developed for the Enets language at the end of the 1980s, it has yet to be made official. In spite of this, it has been used to produce three books, including a Russian-Enets student dictionary. Enets is written with an adapted form of the
Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script writing system isan alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, and used in the Slavic national languages of Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and...
, incorporating the supplemental letters , and .
| А а |
Б б |
В в |
Г г |
Д д |
Е е |
Ё ё |
|
| Ж ж |
З з |
И и |
Й й |
К к |
Л л |
М м |
Н н |
| |
О о |
П п |
Р р |
С с |
|
Т т |
У у |
| Ф ф |
Х х |
Ц ц |
Ч ч |
Ш ш |
Щ щ |
ъ |
Ы ы |
| ь |
Э э |
Ю ю |
Я я |
Forest Enets
Forest Enets is the smaller of the two Enets dialects. In the winter of 2006/2007, approximately 35 people spoke it (6 in
DudinkaDudinka is a town in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. It was the administrative center of Taymyr Autonomous Okrug, which was merged into Krasnoyarsk Krai on January 1, 2007. It is a port in the lower reaches of the Yenisei River, accessible to seagoing ships....
, 20 in Potapova and 10 in Tukhard, the youngest of whom was born in 1962 and the oldest in 1945). Many of these speakers are trilingual, with competence in Forest Enets,
Tundra NenetsNenets is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia. It belongs to the Samoyedic languages which form the Uralic language family with the Finno-Ugric languages. There are two major dialects—Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets—with low mutual intelligibility between the two...
and
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
, preferring to speak Tundra Nenets.
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