Nivkh language

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Nivkh language

Nivkh or Gilyak (self-designation: ?????? ???; Japanese

Japanese language

IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
: , nivufu-go/giriyaku-go) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria

Outer Manchuria

Outer Manchuria , known in China as Outer Northeast [China] , and Priamurye in Russia, is the territory ceded by China to Russia in the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860....
, in the basin of the Amgun

Amgun River

Amgun River is a river in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia which flows northeast and joins the Amur River from the left near its mouth. The length of the river is 723 km....
(a tributary of the Amur

Amur

The Amur River or Heilong Jiang is the Earth's ninth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China....
), along the lower reaches of the Amur

Amur

The Amur River or Heilong Jiang is the Earth's ninth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China....
itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin

Sakhalin

Sakhalin , also Saghalien, is a large elongated island in the North Pacific, lying between 45?50' and 54?24' N. It is part of Russia and is its largest island, administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast....
. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation. Its speakers are known as the Nivkhs

Nivkhs

The Nivkhs are an indigenous people ethnic group inhabiting the northern half of Sakhalin Island and the region of the Amur River estuary in Russia's Khabarovsk Krai....
.

Nivkh is a language isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language....
; i.e., it does not appear to be related to any other language. For classification convenience, it is included in the group of Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate groupof languages spoken in remote regions of Siberia....
.

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Encyclopedia

Nivkh or Gilyak (self-designation: ?????? ???; Japanese

Japanese language

Outer Manchuria

Amgun River

Amgun River is a river in Khabarovsk Krai, Russia which flows northeast and joins the Amur River from the left near its mouth. The length of the river is 723 km....
(a tributary of the Amur

Amur

The Amur River or Heilong Jiang is the Earth's ninth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China....
), along the lower reaches of the Amur

Amur

The Amur River or Heilong Jiang is the Earth's ninth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China....
itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin

Sakhalin

Nivkhs

Language isolate

Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate groupof languages spoken in remote regions of Siberia....
. Many words in the Nivkh language bear a certain resemblance to words of similar meaning in other Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages

Paleosiberian languages or Paleoasian languages is a term of convenience used in linguistics to classify a disparate groupof languages spoken in remote regions of Siberia....
, Ainu

Ainu language

Hokkaido Ainu is an Ainu languages spoken by members of the Ainu people ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.Until the twentieth century, Ainu languages were also spoken throughout the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and by small numbers of people in the Kuril Islands....
, Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
, or Altaic languages

Altaic languages

Altaic is a disputed language family that is generally held by its proponents to include the Turkic languages, Mongolic languages, Tungusic languages, Korean language, and Japonic languages language families ....
, but no regular sound correspondences have been discovered to systematically account for the vocabularies of these various languages, so any lexical similarities are considered to be due to chance or to borrowing. Recently, the Nivkh language was included in the controversial Eurasiatic languages

Eurasiatic languages

Eurasiatic is a hypothetical language family proposed by Joseph Greenberg that groups all of the language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia into a single higher-order family, with the sole exception of the Yeniseian languages, spoken in part of Siberia, but including the Eskimo-Aleut languages, spoken in northernmost North Amer...
hypothesis by Joseph Greenberg

Joseph Greenberg

Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguistics, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic relationship of languages....
.

The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897, and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these has dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so that there are now just over 1,000 first-language speakers left.

Dialects

Nivkh is divided into four dialect

Dialect

A dialect is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class....
s, the Amur

Amur

The Amur River or Heilong Jiang is the Earth's ninth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and Northeastern China....
dialect, the North Sakhalin dialect, the South Sakhalin dialect, and the East Sakhalin dialect. The lexical and phonological differences between the dialect spoken by the Nivkhs of the Amur River basin and the dialect spoken by the Nivkhs of Sakhalin Island are so great that some linguists have classified them as two distinct languages belonging to a small Nivkh language family. Other linguists have emphasized the high degree of variability of usage among all Nivkhs; even within the Amur or Sakhalin dialect zone, there is said to be great diversity depending on the village, clan, or even individual speaker.

Grammar

The grammar of Nivkh is highly synthetic, with a developed case system, as well as other grammatical markers, but no grammatical 'gender'. Nivkh is unique for the high degree of incorporation between words. For example, those morphemes which express spatial relationships (prepositions or postpositions in many other languages) are incorporated into the noun to which they relate. A single word may consist of a combination of several roots, nouns, verbs, and affixes in order to express a particular meaning. Thus, in Nivkh, the formation of each individual word is significant to the sentence.

Phonology

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:...	Labio- dental Labiodental consonant In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants Place of articulation with the lower lip and the upper teeth. The labiodental 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 Dental alveolus of the superior teeth....	Palato- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, placing them a bit further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate ....	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex consonant....	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 Soft palate)....	Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the Palatine uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
Stop Stop consonant A stop, plosive, or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. The terms plosive and stop are usually used interchangeably, but they are not perfect synonyms....	aspirated
	unaspirated
	affricate Affricate consonant Affricate consonants begin as stop consonants but release as a fricative consonant rather than directly into the following vowel....
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two Place of articulation 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 language , the final consonant of Bach; or the side of the tongue ag...	voiceless
	voiced
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 trill....	voiced
	voiceless
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that could be regarded as intermediate between vowels and "typical" consonants. In the articulation of approximants, articulatory organs produce a narrowing of the vocal tract, but leave enough space for air to flow without much audible turbulence....

Vowels

The vowel system of Nivkh is unusual, being described by Ian Maddieson

Ian Maddieson

Ian Maddieson is a linguistics at University of California, Berkeley, an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, and vice-president of the International Phonetic Association....
as "defective." It is actually a rotated system in which a gap in the mid front region of the vowel space is compensated for by moving vowels around. The centralised has been described by Maddieson (1984) as complementing a gap caused by the lack of an ordinary mid front vowel.

The mid front vowel expected in a five-vowel system may have in the past developed into a close-to-mid front unrounded diphthong, represented in Maddieson's description of the language as .

Bibliography

Gruzdeva, Ekaterina. 1998. Nivkh, Lincom Europa, Munich, ISBN 3895860395
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds, Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is a printer and publisher granted a Royal Letters Patent by Henry VIII of England in 1534. It is the world's oldest continually operating book publisher....
, ISBN 0521265363
Mattissen, Johanna. 2003. Dependent Head Synthesis in Nivkh: A Contribution to a Typology of Polysynthesis, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, ISBN 1588114767

External links

from The Red Book
The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire

The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire is a book about the small nations of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russia and some other post-Soviet states of today....
The World's Largest Sound Archive of the Nivkh Language on the Web
at Omniglot