Enets language

Enets is a Samoyedic language of Northern Siberia spoken on the Lower Yenisei within the boundaries of the Taimyr Municipality District, a subdivision of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian Federation. Enets belongs to the Northern branch of the Samoyedic languages, in turn a branch of the Uralic language family.

Status

In 2010 about 40 people claimed to be native Enets speakers, while in 2020, 69 people claimed to speak Enets natively, while 97 people claimed to know Enets in total.
Older generation still speaks their language, but education is in Russian and very little of Enets language is taught and the language is almost unused in everyday life.

Dialects

There are two distinct dialects, and, which may be considered separate languages.
Tundra Enets is the smaller of the two Enets dialects. In the winter of 2006/2007, approximately 35 people spoke it. Many of these speakers are trilingual, with competence in Forest Enets, Tundra Nenets and Russian, preferring to speak Tundra Nenets.
The two dialects differ both in phonology and in lexicon. Additional variation was found in early Enets records from the 17th to 19th centuries, though all these varieties can be assigned as either Tundra Enets or Forest Enets.
Phonological differences:

In some words, Forest Enets corresponds to Tundra Enets .
* Forest mese — Tundra meɟe 'wind' ;
* Forest osa — Tundra uɟa 'meat' ;
* Forest sira — Tundra silra 'snow';
* Forest judado — Tundra judaro 'pike';
* Forest kadaʔa — Tundra karaʔa 'grandmother';
In some words, Forest Enets word-initial corresponds to Tundra Enets .
Certain vowel + glide sequences of Proto-Samoyedic have different reflexes in Forest Enets and Tundra Enets.
Forest Enets word-initial corresponds to Tundra Enets.

Lexical differences:

Forest eba — Tundra aburi 'head'
Forest baða — Tundra nau 'word'
Forest ʃaru — Tundra oma 'tobacco'
Forest abbua — Tundra miʔ 'what'
Phonology

The following phoneme inventories are combined from all of the different dialects of the Enets languages. Uralicist transcription, often used in literature on Enets, is given below the IPA transcription.

Vowels

Vowel length is indicated by a macron, e.g. ē.

Consonants

There is partial or complete vowel reduction in the middle and at the end of a word
Consonants preceding i and e become palatalized
Stress

The type of stress in Enets is quantitative. Stressed vowels are pronounced relatively longer than unstressed vowels. Based on the available data, the stress is not used as a feature for distinguishing the meaning. The stress in a word usually falls on the first vowel. The primary stress usually falls on the first syllable and is accompanied by a secondary stress, which falls on the third and the fifth syllable. Sometimes the stress distinguishes the meaning, e.g. in mo·di vs. modi·..

Orthography

Enets is written using the Cyrillic alphabet with several additional letters that are not used in the Russian alphabet.
The written form of the Enets language was created during the 1980s and has been used to produce a number of books. During the 1990s there was a local newspaper with insert in local languages, Советский Таймыр published and brief Enets broadcasts on local radio, which shut down in 2003, served as supplements for speakers.
In 2019, the Enets alphabet was reformed, and in April 2020, the Enets primer was published in a new version of the alphabet. The alphabet contains the following letters:

Grammar

Enets nouns vary for number, case, and person-number of the possessor. There is also an intriguing nominal case in which 'destinativity' determines the entity is destined for someone. Possessor markers are also used for discourse related purposes, where they are completely devoid of the literal possessive meaning. Enets postpositions are marked for person-number; many postpositions are formed from a small set of relational nouns and case morphology.

Morphology

The parts of speech in Enets are: nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, interjections and connective particles.
The grammatical number is expressed by means of the opposition of the singular, dual and plural forms. There are three declensions, the main, possessive and desiderative declensions, and seven cases in Enets: the nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, ablative and prolative case. The meaning of those cases is expressed by means of suffixes added to nouns, adjectives, pronouns and substantivized verbs. In their fixed forms they also belong to adverbs and postpositions. The possession is expressed by means of the genitive case or possessive suffixes.
Local orientation is based on the three-member distribution: the suffixes of local cases of nouns, adverbs and postpositions are divided among the lative, locative and ablative. The prolative case expresses an additional fourth local characteristic.
The verbal negation is expressed by the combination of the main verb with a preceding auxiliary negative verb. The auxiliary verb is conjugated according to general rules, but the main verb is in a special inconjugated negative form. There are also some verbs of absence - non-possessiveness. Six moods are contrasted in the Enets language: indicative, conjunctive, imperative, optative, quotative and interrogative. There are three tenses: aorist, preterite and future.
The category of person with nouns is expressed by means of possessive suffixes, differing in all three numbers of all three persons and used in nouns, pronouns, substantivized verbs, adverbs and postpositions. The category of person with verbs is expressed by means of particular personal suffixes of the verb, differing in all three numbers of all three persons.
There are three conjugations in Enets: subjective, objective and reflexive. These conjugations differ from each other by personal suffixes. Additionally, the objective conjugation uses numerical suffixes, referring to all three numbers of the object. In the case of the reflexive conjugation, the person of the subject and object is the same and a separate suffix indicates reflexivity.

Nouns

Depending on the final sounds of the word stem, nouns can be divided into two groups:

nouns with a final sound other than a laryngal plosive stop, e.g. dʲuda 'horse'
nouns with a final laryngal plosive stop, e.g. tauʔ 'Nganasan'

Either group uses variants of suffixes with a different initial sound.
There are seven cases in Enets: the nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, ablative and prolative case. The case suffixes are combined with numeral markers, often in a fairly complex manner.

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	-	-ʔ
Genitive	-ʔ	-ʔ
Accusative	-	-ʔ
Lative	-d/-t	-hɨð/-gɨð/-kɨð
Locative	-hVn/-gon/-kon	-hɨn/-gɨn/-kɨn
Ablative	-hVð/-gɨð/-kɨð	-hɨt/-gɨt/-kɨt
Prolative	-on/-mon	-ɨn/-on

The dual case forms are produced on the basis of an uninflected dual form with the suffix -hɨʔ/-gɨʔ/-kɨʔ by adding the respective singular case endings of some postpositions in local cases.

Adjectives

There are a number of adjectives that have no specific suffixes, e.g. utik 'bad', sojδa 'good', lodo 'low' and piδe 'high'.
Alongside these, there are various suffixal adjectives, e.g. buse̮-saj ne̮ 'a married woman', bite-δa 'waterless', uδa-šiδa 'handless', mȯga-he 'belonging to the forest', same-raha 'wolf-like', narδe-de̮ 'red', polδe-de̮ 'black'.
The adjective does not agree with its head either in number or case, e.g. agga koja 'big sterlet', agga koja-hone, agga koja-hi̮t. As an exception, we can refer to the use of the adjective instead of an elliptical noun and as a predicate in the nominal conjugation.
To strengthen a possessive connection, sometimes a respective possessive suffix may be added to the head of an attribute, e.g. keδerʔ koba-δa ŋul'ʔ mujuʔ 'the wild reindeer skin is very strong'.
The comparative degree is formed by means of an adjective in the positive degree with the word to be compared in the ablative form.

Verbs

The verbs in Enets can be distributed into two groups in principally the same manner as the noun depending on the final sounds of the word stem. Either group uses the variants of suffixes with different initial sounds.
Seven moods are contrasted: indicative, conjunctive, imperative, optative, quotative and interrogative. There are three tenses: aorist, preterite and future. The verb has three conjugations: subjective, objective and reflexive. These conjugations differ from each other by personal suffixes. In addition to this the objective conjugation uses numerical suffixes, referring to all three numbers of the object. In the case of reflexive conjugation a separate suffix indicates reflexivity.

Finite forms

The aorist is either unmarked or with the marker -ŋV-/-V-. The temporal meaning of the aorist depends on the aspect of the verb. A prolonged or recurrent action should be understood as taking place in the present, a short-time or single action as having taken place in the past, whereas the influence of the latter is still felt in the present. A distinctly past action is expressed by the preterite with the marker -ś/-š/-d'/-t'/-č, whereas the marker is placed after personal suffixes. The future action is expressed by the future marker -d-/-dV-/-t-/-tV- before personal suffixes.
The objective conjugation uses one type of personal suffixes when the object is in the singular and another type of them with the object in the dual or the plural. In the case of the dual object the dual marker -hu-/-gu-/-ku- precedes the dual personal suffixes of the second type, whereas in the case of the plural object, the rise of the stem vowel can be observed. The marker of the reflexive mood is -i-, which is standing before personal suffixes.