The Nenets language is far from the most common language in Russia, bearing the imprint of the traditional culture of the Nenets people. According to the results of the 2010 All-Russian Population Census, the number of Nenets in Russia is about 40,000 people, while the number of native speakers of this language is just over 20,000 people.
The main territory of the distribution and existence of the language is the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. It is also spoken in the Komi Republic, the Arkhangelsk region and some other regions of the country along the distance from the Kola Peninsula to the Yenisei. According to tradition, it is customary to divide the Nenets language into two main dialects: forest and tundra, but gradually they are bred into Neshan and Nenets. For linguists, this is a separate research topic.
Characteristic
The name of the Nenets language is “nenetsya’ vada”. It belongs to the northern group of the Samoyedic language branch belonging to the Ural family. It is characterized by an agglutinating type,the presence of a small case system, a system of singular, dual and plural numbers, a rather undeveloped system of verb tenses.
The Nenets came to the territory of their current habitat around the first millennium of our era. Their nationality was formed from the merger of the peoples of southern Siberia with the aboriginal population of the tundra zone. There is an assumption that the meeting of two ancestral peoples is reflected in Nenets folklore in the image of the mythical people of Sikhirt. It is still not clear whether this people existed or not, but the legends about them excite modern historians.
Writing
Throughout their history, the Nenets established cultural and social contacts with the Mansi, Khanty, Russians, Komi and Permians, which could not but affect the development of both their culture and language. There is a very small number of works published in the Yamalo-Nenets language, and even fewer about it. This movement started very recently. So, the first primer was published only in 1932, the first Russian-Nenets dictionary - in 1937.
Is it worth it to go into details, even if the first Nenets alphabet appeared only in 1931, and it was created artificially, based on the Latin alphabet. In 1937, an alphabet based on the Cyrillic alphabet was created.
Grammar
The language of the Nenets Autonomous Okrug has retained the longitude and shortness of vowels. Consonants, as in Russian, are contrasted here on the basis of hardness and softness. In the phonemic system, there are two sounds with glottal stops.
Besides the usual nominative,genitive and accusative cases are dative-directive, local instrumental, deferred and longitudinal.
Nenets Forest Language
The Nenets Forest language, which has already been mentioned above, is the main language of the small Nesha indigenous people living in the forests and taiga of the Khanty-Mansiysk and Yamalo-Nenets districts. Such a language is also often referred to as a non-Shan language. By the way, "ne'sha" on it means nothing more than the word "people".
Even in Soviet linguistics, it was noted that the Neshan Nenets is very different from the tundra. At the same time, its similarity with the languages of the Khanty and Mansi is often indicated - the Forest Nenets themselves also consider their language to be similar to the Khanty. The writing was created only in 1994. With its help, mainly scientific and reference literature is created, devoted to the study of the language and the basics of its teaching.
Use
Mostly in the territory of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russian is used for communication. Nenets is almost equal to it - it can often be heard in places densely populated by representatives of the indigenous population. Also, the main laws and regulations of this subject of the Russian Federation have been translated into the local language.
