Selkup language

Selkup
Native to Russia
Region Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
Ethnicity Selkup people
Native speakers
1,000 (2010 census)[1]
Uralic
Language codes
ISO 639-2 sel
ISO 639-3 sel
Glottolog selk1253[2]

Selkup language is the language of the Selkups, belonging to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family. It is spoken by some 1,570 people (1994 est.) in the region between the Ob and Yenisei Rivers (in Siberia). The language name Selkup comes from the Russian "cелькупский язык" (selkupsky yazyk), based on the native name used in the Taz dialect, шӧльӄумыт әты šöľqumyt әty, lit. forest-man language. Different dialects use different names.

Selkup is fractured in an extensive dialect continuum whose ends are no longer mutually intelligible. The three main varieties are the Taz (Northern) dialect (тазовский диалект, tazovsky dialekt), which became the basis of the Selkup written language in the 1930s, Tym (Central) dialect (тымский диалект, tymsky dialekt), and Ket dialect (кетский диалект, ketsky dialekt).

Phonology

There are 25 vowel and 16 consonant phonemes in the Taz dialect.

Taz Selkup consonants
Labial Dental Palatal(ized) Velar Uvular
Nasals /m/ /n/ /nʲ/ /ŋ/ [ɴ]
Stops /p/ /t/ /tʲ/ /k/ /q/
Fricatives ([f]) /s/ /sʲ/ ([x]) ([χ])
Trills /r/ [ʀ]
Laterals /l/ /lʲ/
Semivowels /w/ /j/
Taz Selkup vowels
Front Central Back
Unrounded Rounded Unrounded Rounded
Tense Close /i/, /iː/ /y/, /yː/ /ɨ/, /ɨː/ /u/, /uː/
Mid /e/, /eː/ /ø/, /øː/ /ɘ/, /ɘː/ /o/, /oː/
Open /æ/, /æː/ /a/, /aː/
Lax Close /ɪ/, /ɪː/ [ɪ̈ ~ ə]
Mid /ɛ/, /ɛː/ /ɔː/

Selkup has a syllable structure (C)V(C). Word-initial /ŋ/ and word-final /tʲ/ or /w/ do not occur. Various consonant clusters and geminate consonants such as /nt/, /rm/, /sʲsʲ/ may occur, though many potential combinations occurring morphologically are simplified.

Stress in Selkup is marginally phonemic. Generally the rightmost long vowel in a word is stressed, or otherwise the first syllable, but certain suffixes with short vowels may acquire stress, leading to minimal pairs such as [ˈtɕɛlʲtɕalqo] "to stamp down" vs. [tɕɛlʲˈtɕalqo] "to stamp once".

References

  1. Selkup at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Selkup". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

External links

Selkup language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, April 18, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.