Forest Nenets is a Samoyedic language

Samoyedic languages

The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 30,000 speakers altogether....

 spoken in northern Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, around the Agan

Agan River

Agan is a river in Tyumen Oblast in Russia. It is 544 km long and its basin is 32 200 km²....

, Pur

Pur River

The Pur River is a river in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Russia. The Pur River proper starts at the confluence of the Pyakupur and Aivasedapur Rivers. The length of the Pur River is 389 km. It is often considered as the Pyakupur's extension, which would make it 1,024 km long...

, Lyamin and Nadym rivers

Nadym River

The Nadym is a river in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia. It is a left tributary of the Ob River. The length of the Nadym River is . The area of its basin is . The river originates in Lake Numto and flows into the Kara Sea. It freezes up in October and stays under the ice until late May. The...

, by the Nenets people

Nenets people

The Nenets are an indigenous people in Russia. According to the latest census in 2002, there are 41,302 Nenets in the Russian Federation, most of them living in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Nenets Autonomous Okrug...

. It is closely related to the Tundra Nenets language

Tundra Nenets language

Tundra Nenets is a Samoyedic language spoken in northern Russia, from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, by the Nenets people. It is closely related to Nganasan and Enets, more distantly related to Selkup and even more distantly to the other Uralic languages...

, and the two are still sometimes seen as simply being dialects of a single Nenets language, despite there being low mutual intelligibility

Mutual intelligibility

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is recognized as a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related languages can readily understand each other without intentional study or extraordinary effort...

 between the two. The next closest relatives are Nganasan

Nganasan language

Nganasan language is a language of the Nganasan people...

 and Enets

Enets language

Enets is a Samoyedic language spoken by the Enets people along the lower Yenisei River in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. 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...

, after them Selkup

Selkup language

Selkup language is a language of the Selkups, belonging to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family. It is spoken by some 1,570 people in the region between the Ob and Yenisei Rivers . The language name Selkup comes from the Russian "" , based on the native name used in the Taz dialect, ...

, and even more distantly the other Uralic languages

Uralic languages

The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...

.

Vowels

In stressed syllables, the vowel phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s of the Forest Nenets dialect are:

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...		Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
	Short Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...	Long Vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...	Short	Long
High	i	iː	u	uː
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel...	(e)	eː	(o)	oː
Low	æ	æː	ɑ	ɑː

In unstressed syllables length is not contrastive, and there are only five vowel qualities, to wit /æ ɑ ə i u/. Word stress is not fixed to a certain position of a root; this leads to alternations of stressed mid vowels with unstressed high vowels. Long vowels are slightly more common than short vowels, although it is important to note that in words of a monosyllabic nature, short vowels are the only vowels that can occur. The short mid vowels /e o/ in particular are marginal, occurring only in a small number of monosyllabic words and commonly merged into the corresponding high vowels /i u/. This is additionally complicated by the short high vowels /i u/ becoming lowered to /e o/ before /ə/. Salminen (2007) notes that due to these two facts, the long vowels should be considered basic, and the short vowels as the more marked

Markedness

Markedness is a specific kind of asymmetry relationship between elements of linguistic or conceptual structure. In a marked-unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one...

 phonemes.

/æː/ and its unstressed counterpart only occur in non-palatal syllables and may be realized as a diphthong [ae] or [aɛ]. Short /æ/ is usually [aj] (and is also written as ай, though this spelling also represents the sequence /ɑj/), but alternates with its long counterpart in the same way as the other short vowels.

Some western dialects lack /æ/, replacing it with /e/.

Reduced vowel

Forest Nenets and its sister dialect, Tundra Nenets

Tundra Nenets language

Tundra Nenets is a Samoyedic language spoken in northern Russia, from the Kanin Peninsula to the Yenisei River, by the Nenets people. It is closely related to Nganasan and Enets, more distantly related to Selkup and even more distantly to the other Uralic languages...

, have long been thought to have a so-called "reduced vowel". This reduced vowel was thought to have had two distinct qualities depending on whether or not it was subject to stress

Stress (linguistics)

In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...

 in the word or not. It has been historically transcribed as <ø> when stressed, representing a reduced variant of an underlying vowel, and as <â>, representing a reduced variant of /a/, when unstressed. Recent developments indicate, however, that the reduced vowels are in fact short vowels which act as counterparts to their respective long vowels. The transcription <â> is more properly replaced and represented by , while <ø> simply represents a short vowel, although this orthography does not delineate its exact phonetic value.

Consonants

		Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...		Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Postalveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...	Alveolopalatal	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....		Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
		Plain	Palatalized Palatalization In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....	Plain	Palatalized				Plain	Palatalized	Plain	Palatalized
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...		m	mʲ	n	nʲ			(ɲ)¹	ŋ
Plosive	Voiceless	p	pʲ	t	tʲ			(c)²	k	kʲ	ʔ
	Voiced	b	bʲ	d	dʲ			(ɟ)³	g	gʲ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...				t͜s	t͜sʲ		(t͜ɕ)⁴
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	Voiceless			s	sʲ		(ɕ)⁵	(ç)⁶	x		h	hʲ
	Voiced					ʒ	ʑ
Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular....				r	rʲ
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...								j	w
Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....				l	lʲ		(ʎ)⁷

Notes:

• ¹ Allophone of /nʲ/.
• ² Allophone of /kʲ/.
• ³ Allophone of /gʲ/.
• ⁴ Allophone of /t͜sʲ/.
• ⁵ Allophone of /sʲ/.
• ⁶ Allophone of /hʲ/.
• ⁷ Allophone of /lʲ/.

The /ʲ/ mark denotes palatalization

Palatalization

In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....

, or a movement towards palatal articulation or secondary palatal articulation.

Orthography

Nenets is written with an adapted form of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

, incorporating the supplemental letters , ʼ

Modifier letter apostrophe

The modifier letter apostrophe is a glyph. It is used in the orthography of Tundra Nenets to denote a glottal stop. In IPA it is used to express ejective consonants. It is encoded at ....

, and ˮ

Modifier letter double apostrophe

The modifier letter double apostrophe is a spacing glyph. It is used in the orthography of Tundra Nenets to denote a glottal stop, or in the orthography of Dan to indicate that a syllable has a top tone. It is encoded at .-See also:...

.

А а а	Б б бе	В в ве	Г г ге	Д д де	Е е е	Ё ё ё	Ж ж же
З з зе	И и и	Й й й	й й	К к ка	Л л ел	М м ем	Н н ен
еӈ	О о о	П п пе	Р р ер	С с ес	Т т те	У у у	Ф ф еф
Х х ха	Ц ц це	Ч ч че	Ш ш ша	Щ щ ща	Ъ ъ ъ	Ы ы ы
Ь ь ь	Э э э	Ю ю ю	Я я я	ʼ	ˮ