Nivkh 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 (spoken on the coasts around the Amur Liman, including the mainland and west Sakhalin), the East Sakhalin variety (including populations around the Tym River), and the South Sakhalin variety (spoken around the Poronay River). 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 (1998) notes that speakers of East Sakhalin and the lower Amur cannot understand each other, and divides the varieties into two languages, Nivkh proper (including the lower Amur, Northern Sakhalin / Straits and Western Sakhalin varieties) and Nighvng (the East and South Sakhalin varieties). Fortescue (2016) 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 (ASJP 4) by Müller et al. (2013) found lexical similarities among Nivkh, Mongolic, and Tungusic, likely due to lexical borrowings. Hudson & Robbeets (2020) 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 (4,500) and in 2002 (5,200). 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, 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" (Nivkh language) 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 . 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 (e.g. a prefix or an adjunct), 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 (e.g. "man"). In some transitive verbs, the process has been noted to apparently run in reverse (fricatives/trills fortiting to stops, with the same distribution). 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 (which still survives in the citation form of other verbs, where it causes regular consonant alternation). Initial fricatives in nouns never change. Stress Stress tends to fall on the first syllable, although this could highly fluctuate, with dialectal variation. Minimal pairs distinguished by stress are ostensibly rare. ==Orthography==

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

Nivkh is an agglutinative synthetic language. It has a developed case system as well as other grammatical markers. The basic word order of Nivkh is subject–object–verb (SOV), the subject being frequently omitted in speech, similar to Korean. Nivkh is notable for the high degree of incorporation between words. For example, morphemes that express spatial relationships (prepositions or postpositions in many other languages) are incorporated into the noun to which they relate. Words consist of easily definable roots and productive grammatical morphemes, most of which are suffixes. Nivkh has no adjectives, but rather verbs that describe a state of being. There are only two verb tenses: non-future and future. The non-future form may combine with adverbials, as well as context, to indicate a time frame. As Russian has become the dominant language in all spheres of life, Nivkh grammar has changed in the last century. For example, Nivkh has recently begun to mark plurals on counting nouns and pairs, a change that originated from the grammar rules of Russian. However, it has been postulated that due to the vastly disparate grammatical structures of the two languages, grammatical interference has not been extensive. Simplification has occurred by borrowing Russian structure though. Due to the disuse of the language and the changing culture, many of the complex morphological aspects of Nivkh have been simplified or become obsolete. In a process referred to as obsolescence, things like the distinction between the morpheme for counting sledges and the morpheme for counting fishnets has disappeared, with speakers opting to use more general categories of counting numbers or other descriptors. ==Language contact with the Ainu people==

The Ainu appear to have experienced intensive contact with the Nivkhs during the course of their history. It is not known to what extent this has affected Nivkh. Linguists generally believe the vocabulary shared between the Ainu language and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing. == Sample text ==