Nivkh languages

Nivkh, Gilyak, or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun, along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
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 dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. That may have been an overcount, however, as the 2010 census recorded only 198 native speakers, less than 4% of the ethnic population.
Proto-Nivkh, the proto-language ancestral to the modern-day languages, has been reconstructed by Fortescue.

Languages

Nivkh is a dialect continuum. There is a high degree of variability of usage among Nivkhs depending on village, clan, and even the individual speaker. Varieties are traditionally grouped into four geographic clusters. These are the lower-Amur variety, the North Sakhalin variety, the East Sakhalin variety, and the South Sakhalin variety. The lexical and phonological differences across these varieties is great enough that specialists describe them as falling into two or three languages, though for purposes of language revival among a small and already divided population, Nivkh is generally presented as a single language, due to fears of the consequences of further division.
Gruzdeva notes that speakers of East Sakhalin and the lower Amur cannot understand each other, and divides the varieties into two languages, Nivkh proper and Nighvng. Fortescue notes that the Amur, East Sakhalin and South Sakhalin varieties have low intelligibility with each other, and considers each of them to constitute a separate language.

Classification

Nivkh is not known to be related to any other language, making it a language isolate. For convenience, it may be included in the geographical group of Paleosiberian languages. Many words in the Nivkh languages bear a certain resemblance to words of similar meaning in other Paleosiberian languages, Ainu, Korean, or Tungusic languages, but no regular sound correspondences have been discovered to systematically account for the vocabularies of these various families, so any lexical similarities are considered to be due to chance or to borrowing.
Michael Fortescue suggested in 1998 that Nivkh might be related to the Mosan languages of North America. Later, in 2011, he argued that Nivkh, which he referred to as an "isolated Amuric language", was related to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, forming a Chukotko-Kamchatkan–Amuric language family. However, Glottolog considers the evidence to be "insufficient".
In 2015, Sergei Nikolaev argued in two papers for a systematic relationship between Nivkh and the Algic languages of North America, and a more distant relationship between these two together and the Wakashan languages of coastal British Columbia.
The Nivkh languages are included in the widely rejected Eurasiatic languages hypothesis by Joseph Greenberg.
An automated computational analysis by Müller et al. found lexical similarities among Nivkh, Mongolic, and Tungusic, likely due to lexical borrowings.
Hudson & Robbeets conjectured that a language that resembles Nivkh was once distributed in Korea and became the substratum of Koreanic languages. Kim Bang-han proposed that placename glosses in the Samguk sagi reflect the original language of the Korean peninsula and a component in the formation of both Korean and Japanese. He proposed that this language was related to Nivkh. Juha Janhunen suggests the possibility that similar consonant stop systems in Koreanic and Nivkh may be due to ancient contact.

History

The Nivkh people have lived, by many accounts for thousands of years, on the island of Sakhalin and the Amur River. They maintained trade with the neighboring Ainu, Japanese, and Chinese, until Russian contact, which began in the 17th century. The 19th century shows the first recorded decline of Nivkh numbers, with official estimates dropping from 1856 to 1889. This coincided with smallpox epidemics and the expansion of Sakhalin's prisoner population, as Russia began sending groups of its convicts to Sakhalin in 1873. At this time, reportedly few Nivkh spoke Russian.
The official Russian census reported similar numbers of ethnic Nivkhs in 1897 and in 2002. However, the number of native speakers among the ethnic Nivkhs dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period. All recorded native Nivkh speakers were bilingual in Russian, most of them were born in 1920-1940s, when a significant decline in the number of native Nivkh speakers occurred, due to Joseph Stalin's policy of collectivization imposed on indigenous economies, and in many cases, driving Nivkh individuals to hired labor, marking a departure from traditional means of subsistence. Many Nivkh were forcibly displaced from their more widely spread settlements to Nogliki, a small city, in the process of centralization. The traditional Nivkh way of life was gradually and sometimes forcibly converted to a Soviet way of life, as changes in subsistence, diet, dwellings, and education have resulted. As of the 2010s, the Nivkh language was taught in grades 1–3 in several schools in both Sakhalin and Khabarovsk Krai. A monthly newspaper "Nivkh dif" is published in Sakhalin. Nivkh language books are also regularly published in Russia.

Phonology

Consonants

The labial fricatives are weakly articulated, and have been described as both bilabial and labiodental. The palatal stops may have some degree of affrication, as. After nasals or, the unaspirated stops become voiced. Unlike consonant alternation, this can occur within a morpheme. The Amur dialect deletes some word-final nasals, which leads to word-initial voiced stops, allophonic in other dialects, being phonemic in the Amur dialect. The voiceless trill is realized as in East Sakhalin dialect and as an untrilled in the North Sakhalin dialect.
Consonants are palatalized in some contexts, most commonly in younger speakers, where all consonants are palatalized before and. Additionally, there is another context in which consonants are always palatalised, viz. before when it precedes a uvular consonant, e.g. > ‘chicken’.
Nivkh features a process of consonant alternation like in Celtic languages, in which morpheme-initial stops alternate with fricatives and trills:
This occurs when a morpheme is preceded by another morpheme within the same phrase, unless the preceding morpheme ends itself in a fricative or trill, or in a nasal or.

'soup'
'duck soup'
'kind of seal soup'
but: 'bear soup'

Only the morpheme-initial position is affected: other clusters ending in a stop are possible within a morpheme.
In some transitive verbs, the process has been noted to apparently run in reverse. This has been taken a distinct process, but has also been explained to be fundamentally the same, with the citation form of these verbs containing an underlying stop, lenited due to the presence of a former i- prefix. Initial fricatives in nouns never change.

Vowels

There are six vowels in Nivkh:

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Long vowels are not a phonemic feature of Nivkh, but they can be articulated in the case of prosody or compensatory lengthening when a fricative consonant is omitted after the vowel.

Stress

Stress tends to fall on the first syllable, although this could highly fluctuate, with dialectal variation. Minimal pairs distinguished by stress is ostensibly rare.

Orthography

The Nivkh language uses a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet.

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Ӷ ӷ	Ғ ғ	Ӻ ӻ

Д д	Е е	Ё ё	З з	И и	Й й	К к

Кʼ кʼ	Қ қ	Қʼ қʼ	Л л	М м	Н н	Ң ң

О о	П п	Пʼ пʼ	Р р	Р̆ р̆	С с	Т т

Тʼ тʼ	У у	Ф ф	Х х	Ҳ ҳ	Ӿ ӿ	Чʼ чʼ

Ъ ъ	ь	Ы ы	Э э	Ю ю	Я я

The letters Ё, Щ and Ь are only used in Russian loanwords. Various allographs of the letters with descenders are found, and er may take either a breve or a caron. The allographs listed first in the table above are the choice of Нивх диф, the only Nivkh newspaper.
The letters Д, Н and Т stands for two sounds each. When they are followed by a iotized vowel letter, or at the end of a syllable followed by ь, they stand for the affricate or palatal consonants ; otherwise they stand for the alveolar consonants. At the beginning of a syllable, the letters Е, Ё, Ю, Я stands for.
The letter Ӷ is not used in Amur dialect, while is spelled РШ.