COLLECTION OF AUDIO MATERIAL IN THE NENETS LANGUAGE
Nenets-Russian-English Multimedia Dictionary
Introduction
References
Content of Dictionary
How to Use the Dictionary
Speakers
Acknowledgments
Authors
The Nenets language belongs to the Northern branch of the Samoyedic group of
languages, which in its turn forms a part of the Uralic language family. Nenets are a small group of people living along the Arctic Ocean between the Kola Peninsula to the west, the mouth of the Yenisey River to the east. The southern part is bordered by the taiga. In spite of this vast territory in 1989 statistics indicate an indigenous population amounting to circa thirty-five thousand. Slightly more than 77% speak Nenets as their mother tongue. Compared to other small groups of languages in the extreme north western part of Russia, Nenets is not endangered. Nevertheless, there exists no general description of phonetics, prosody and grammar for this language.
The territory inhabited by the Nenets is divided into the three following administrative units, namely:
Nenets Autonomous Okrug (NAO), Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YaNAO), and Dolgano-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (DNAO).
The first okrug occupies the European North of Russia from Arkhangelsk to the Ural Mountains with a population of
approximately six-and-a-half thousand Nenets. The second okrug borders to the east of NAO and the Nenets population
constitutes about twenty-one thousand. The third okrug mentioned is also known as Taimyr, the most eastern okrug with a
Nenets population numbering only some two and a half thousand. There are two Nenets ethnographic groups - Tundra Nenets and
Forest Nenets, each with its own dialect. The latter group (about 5% of all Nenets) live in the Purovsky and Nadymsky districts of the YaNAO and in the Surgutsky and Beloyarsky districts of the Hanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (HMAO). They are integrated with the Russians and other neighbouring people. The Komi-Zyryans are their neighbors to the west and south of the Archangelsk oblast and to the south of the Yamal Peninsula. In Yamal their neighbours are the Hanty and in the Taimyr Okrug it is the Evenki, Dolgans, Enets and Nganasan. The languages of these neighbours also influence the variations of the Nenets language in different regions.
The Nenets language is registered in the UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages and in the Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Federation.
An alphabet for the Nenets language was created in the 1930's based on the Central (Bolshezemelsky) dialect, which was chosen as the main dialect. Modern Nenets is written using the Cyrillic alphabet in addition to certain specific letters not existing in the Russian language. The additional letters are the following:
 | velar nasal |
   |
glottal stop signs |
Besides, diacritics, indicating shortness or lengths of vowels may be added: e.g.,
 | short central mid vowel |
 | long central mid vowel |
The Dictionary was recorded by four native Nenets speakers, who represent
main dialects of the Tundra Nenets language:
| Kanin (Western) |  |
| Bolshaya Zemlja (Central) |  |
| Jamal (Eastern) |  |
| Yenisei (Eastern) |  |
Sub-dialects of the Tundra dialect of the Nenets language
The main difference between the dialects is phonetic and lexical. The specific feature of the
Bolshezemelsky dialect are the taut muscles when enunciating, thus causing high tenseness of pronunciation. This characteristic is
less audible in the west and almost non-existent in the east. The western dialect group made up of the Kanin, Timan and Kolguev
dialects are the most distant dialects as far as the main Central dialect is concerned. Their particular feature are word-initial
vowels whereby a velar nasal is added before vowels in the other dialects. Consequently a word
never begins with a vowel. The velar nasal can also be reduced word-internally. In the dialects of the far west and east,
some words and word forms are pronounced in a contracted manner. This results in a more liberal word order in the far western
dialects as opposed to others.
The dialects differ significantly with respect to phonetics. Pronunciation can differ to such an extent that speakers of the far western and far eastern dialects cannot always understand speakers of the central dialects. This Dictionary shows the synchronic possibilities of expressing a sentence in different dialects and having different pronunciations.
Almazova A.V. Nenets self-taught (Samouchitel' nenetskogo yazyka.). Leningrad, 1961.
Barmich M.Ja. Nenets Language Tables (Nenetskij Yazyk v tablicakh). St-Petersburg, 1999.
Kuprijanova Z.N. Nenets Folklore (Nenetskij fol'klor). Leningrad., 1961.
Pyrerka A.P., Tereshchenko N.M. Russian-Nenets Dictionary (for about 15 000 words). Moscow-Leningrad, 1948.
Tereshchenko N.M. The Nenets Grammar Studies (Ocherk grammatiki nenetskogo yazyka). Leningrad, 1947.
Tereshchenko N.M. Sources and Studies of the Nenets Language (Materialy i issledovanija po yazyku nencev). Leningrad, 1956.
Tereshchenko N.M. Nenets-Russian Dictionary (for about 22 000 words). Moscow, Sovetskaya Encyclopedia, 1965.
Tereshchenko N.M. Nenets-Russian Russian-Nenets Dictionary for Primary School (for about 4000 words). Leningrad, Prosveshchenie, 1982.
Verbov G.D. Forest Nenets dialect. In: Samodijsky sbornik. Novosibirsk, 1973.
Castren M.A. Grammatic der samojedishen Sprachen. St-Petersburg, 1854.
Janhunen J. Glottal stop in Nenets. MSFOu 186, Helsinki 1986.
Hajdu P. Chrestomatia Samojedica. Budapest, 1968.
Micola T. Die alten Postpositionen des Nenzishchen (Juraksamojedishchen). Budapest, 1975.
Salminen T. Tundra Nenets in: The Uralic Languages ed. by Daniel Abondolo, London: Routlege. 1996.
Salminen T. Tundra Nenets Inflection. MSFOu 227, Helsinki 1997.
The base of our Dictionary is the large Nenets-Russian Dictionary and Nenets-Russian Russian-Nenets Dictionary
for Primary School (see earlier). It contains more than 3000 entries, which reflect rather well the traditional culture and lifestyle of the Nenets people. Details of translation, lexical and grammatical indexes and phrase examples for the Nenets words were copied from the big Dictionary. The Nenets corpus of the Dictionary contains the words of the Tundra dialect.
The Dictionary consists of four sub-dictionaries:
[ 1 ] Choose the dictionary (see the chart below).
[ 2 ] Select the initial letter.
[ 3 ] Click the word.
[ 4 ] Get the available information for the entry.
[ 5 ] Listen to the sound.
Technical comments
1. To use this dictionary no additional fonts are needed for the Nenets language.
The charset of the Nenets-Russian and Russian-Nenets Dictionaries is "Windows-1251", that is page encoding is Cyrillic (Windows).
2. To listen to the audio samples you need an MP3-player for the Internet version and any WAV-media player for the off-line version.
3. The browser's frames support is necessary.
As already mentioned above, the recordings in this Dictionary were made by four native Nenets speakers, whereby each one represents one of the main sub-dialects of the Nenets Tundra language.
The speakers were born in the tundra and participated already as children in the nomadic lifestyle of reindeer herders.
| Anna Latysheva | Kanin (Western) |  |
| Valentina Taleeva | Bolshaya Zemlja (Central) |  |
| Albina Neruj | Jamal (Eastern) |  |
| Michail Nenjang | Yenisei (Eastern) |  |
Sub-dialects of the Tundra dialect of the Nenets language
 |
Anna Latysheva (right) |
The Nenets-Russian-English Multimedia Dictionary was created within the framework of the project "Voices of Tundra and Tajga", supported by the NWO
- the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) in 2001 - 2005, and
compiled by the Research Group on Phonetics and Ethnolinguistics, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
(Project coordinator - Dr. Tjeerd de Graaf), and the Department of Phonetics at the St. Petersburg State University, Russian Federation
(Project coordinator - Dr. Lija V. Bondarko).
The Russian Science Foundation for Humanities covers traveling expenses for the field work in 1996 (grant ¹96-04-18012),
which allowed to make recordings to the Dictionary. The creation of the first variant of the dictionary database was supported by
RSFH also (grant ¹98-04-06222).
The authors of the Dictionary express their deep gratitude to the speakers - Michail Nenjang, Valentina Taleeva, Anna Latysheva, and
Albina Neruj for their assistance and comments in the process of preparation of the Dictionary. The studios for recording
were provided by the Regional Radio and Television Committee in Dudinka and by the Department of Phonetics in St.Petersburg State University.
E.Zh.Kuznecova rendered great assistance in inputting the database.
We express our thanks to our colleagues in the Institute for Linguistic Studies and in the Department of Phonetics,
especially for Prof. Lija V.Bondarko and Prof. Alexander P.Volodin for their consultations and moral support.
The fragment of the map above is borrowed from the School Encyclopedia "Arctica - moy dom".
Marina Lublinskaya (Institute of Linguistic Research, Russian Academy of Science) the Dictionary compilation, audio recordings and segmentation and database inputting
Tatiana Sherstinova (Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University) database development, technical support, Web-design and programming
Lubov Radnaeva (Department of Phonetics, St. Petersburg State University) translation into English.
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