Nenets

Introduction

Nenets speaking areas in Russia.

Nenets is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia.

The language of the Nenets belongs to the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic languages, comprising together with the Enets (Forest and Tundra) and Nganasan languages its Northern Group.

There are two major dialects with low mutual intelligibility between the two:

• Tundra Nenets (~25,000 speakers)
• Forest Nenets (~1,600 speakers)

Nenets was formerly known as Yurak or Yurak Samoyed, both now obsolete.

The verb

The finite inflectional categories are

• 16 moods: indicative, imperative, conjunctive, necessitative, interrogative, imperfective probabilitative, perfective probabilitative, obligative, imperfective approximative, perfective approximative, futuritive approximative, superprobabilitative, hyperprobabilitative, narrative, reputative, and desiderative.
• 2 tenses: aorist and preterite
• 3 conjugational classes: subjective, objective, and reflexive,
• number of object in the objective conjugation,
• person of subject, and
• number of subject: singular, dual, plural

There are also several non-finite forms.

External References

• Nenets(approve sites) (The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire)
• Nenets grammatical sketch