Northern Khanty language


Northern Khanty is a Uralic language, frequently considered a dialect of a unified Khanty language, spoken by between 5,000 to 10,000 people. It is the most widely spoken out of all the Khanty languages, the majority composed of 5,000 speakers in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in Russia. The reason for this discrepancy is that dialects of Northern Khanty have been better preserved in its northern reaches, and the Middle Ob and Kazym dialects are losing favor to Russian. All four dialects have been literary, beginning with the Middle Ob dialects, but shifting to Kazym, and back to Middle Ob, now the most used dialect in writing. The Shuryshkar dialects are also written, primarily due to an administrative division between the two, as the latter is spoken in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

Dialects

Dialects of Northern Khanty:

Transitional

  • Atlym, Nizyam

Phonology

Kazym

Consonants

The Kazym dialect distinguishes 18 consonants.

Vowels

The vowel inventory is much simpler. Ten vowels are distinguished in initial syllables: six full and four reduced. In unstressed syllables, four values are found:.
A similarly simple vowel inventory is found in the Nizyam, Sherkal, and Berjozov dialects, which have full and reduced. Aside from the full vs. reduced contrast rather than one of length, this is identical to that of the adjacent Sosva dialect of Mansi.

Obdorsk

Vowels

The Obdorsk dialect has retained full close vowels and has a nine-vowel system: full vowels and reduced vowels.

Consonants

However, it has a simpler consonant inventory, having the lateral approximants /l lʲ/ in place of the fricatives /ɬ ɬʲ/ and having fronted to /s n/.

Alphabet

A new alphabet scheme for Northern Khanty was published in 2013. The various written standards, such as Kazym and Surgut, have their own versions of this alphabet, with some different letters. The influential ' publishing house, which publishes many of the textbooks and early literacy material for the smaller languages of Russia, designed curved-tail variants of the letters ԯ and ң with a tick, namely ԓ and ӈ, and these have been redundantly encoded in Unicode as separate characters. Comments on CYRILLIC CHE WITH HOOK’s use in Khanty and Tofa . These hooked forms have been chosen as the preferred allographs of these letters for the Kazym alphabet. However, the respected Khanty-language journal ' uses the diagonal-tail forms ӆ and ӊ for Kazym.
и and ы are allophones, breaking the phonemic principle of the alphabet.

Sample texts

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Kazym Khanty:
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Article 1 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Kazym Khanty:
Article 1 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in English: