Nivkh ( ; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, Nivhgu dif, ), Gilyak ( ), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. That may have been an overcount, however, as the 2010 census recorded only 198 native speakers, less than 4% of the ethnic population.
Proto-Nivkh(ic), the proto-language ancestral to the modern-day languages, has been reconstructed by Fortescue (2016).
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)Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013. ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 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. p. 8.
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, and in many cases, driving Nivkh individuals to hired labor, marking a departure from traditional means of subsistence. 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; Marina Temina has written textbooks in both the Amur and Sakhalin dialects of Nivkh.
Phonology
Consonants +Nivkh consonantsJuha Janhunen & Ekaterina Gruzdeva (2016) Bringing the orthography of an indigenous language to the digital age: The case of Nivkh in the Russian Far East. Proceedings of the SCRIPTA 2016, Seoul. Labial Alveolar Palato-alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal Nasal Stop tenuis ~ aspirated ~ voiced ~ () Fricative voiceless ~ voiced ~ Approximant () Trill voiceless ~ voiced
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 . After nasals or , the unaspirated stops become voiced . Unlike consonant alternation, this can occur within a morpheme. The Amur dialect deletes some word-final nasals, which leads to word-initial voiced stops, allophonic in other dialects, being phonemic in the Amur dialect.Shiraishi 2006 p.32. The voiceless trill is realized as in East Sakhalin dialect (and presumably also in the Amur dialect, where it is written ) and as an untrilled in the North Sakhalin dialect. /ɢ/ and /w/ are not present in the Amur dialect.
Consonants are palatalized in some contexts, most commonly in younger speakers, where all consonants are palatalized before and . Additionally, there is another context in which consonants are always palatalised, viz. before when it precedes a uvular consonant , e.g. > ‘chicken’.
Nivkh features a process of consonant alternation like in Celtic languages, in which morpheme-initial stops alternate with fricatives and trills. Unlike Celtic languages, initial unaspirated plosives can also alternate with voiced plosives.Nedjalkov & Otaina 2013 pp. 15-16
+Consonant alternations in Nivkh Asp. plos. ↔ v.l. fric. Unasp. plos. ↔ v. fric. ↔ v. plos. Stop Continuant Voiced stop - ~
Alterations occur when a morpheme is preceded by another morpheme within the same phrase (e.g. a prefix or an adjunct). When the preceding morpheme ends itself in a plosive, the following initial consonant (if a plosive) is lenited to a fricative. If the preceding morpheme ends itself in a fricative or trill, the hard stop is preserved. If the preceding morpheme ends in a (lost) nasal or , and the following initial consonant is a unaspirated plosive, the initial consonant becomes a voiced plosive.Nedjalkov & Otaina 2013 pp. 15-16 'house' 'the animal's house' 'the old man's house' 'the dog's house' 'that house' (ⁿ symbolises a lost nasal)
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.
Vowels There are six vowels in Nivkh:
+Nivkh vowelsFrontCentralBackClose~MidOpen
Long vowels are not a phonemic feature of Nivkh, but they can be articulated in the case of prosody or compensatory lengthening when a fricative consonant is omitted after the vowel.
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.
+ Contemporary Nivkh Alphabet А а Б б В в Г г Ӷ ӷ Ғ ғ Ӻ ӻ Д д Е е Ё ё З з И и Й й К к К‘ к‘ Ӄ ӄ (Қ қ) Ӄ‘ ӄ‘ (Қ‘ қ‘) Л л М м Н н Ӈ ӈ (Ң ң) О о П п П‘ п‘ Р р Р̌ р̌ (Р̆ р̆)/ Рш рш С с Т т Т‘ т‘ У у Ф ф Х х Ӽ ӽ (Ҳ ҳ) Ӿ ӿ Ч‘ ч‘ ъ ь Ы ы Э э Ю ю Я я
a. Not present in Amur Nivkh. b. ⟨Рш рш⟩ is the form used in Amur Nivkh. c. Used to block palatalisation of /t/, /d/, /n/ before ⟨я⟩, ⟨и⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨ю⟩. d. Used to palatalise /t/, /d/, /n/ at the end of syllables.
The letters Ш (when not used in ⟨рш⟩) and Щ are only used in Russian loanwords. Various allographs of the letters with descenders are found, and er may take either a caron or a breve. The allographs in the parenthesis in the table above are the choice of Нивх диф, the only Nivkh newspaper.
When the letters ⟨т⟩, ⟨д⟩, and ⟨н⟩ are followed by a iotated vowel letter such as ⟨я⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨и⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨ю⟩, or at the end of a syllable followed by ⟨ь⟩, they are palatalised as . At the beginning of a syllable, the letters Е, Ё, Ю, Я stands for .
Grammar Nivkh grammar is agglutinatingGruzdeva 1998, p.16. with an SOV word order.Gruzdeva 1998, p.40. Words consist of easily definable roots and productive morphemes, most of which are suffixes. There are no dedicated adjectives in Nivkh but the language has attributive verbs which precede their referent.