Institute of Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences 

S. Oskolskaya

Nanai 

I. Sociolinguistic data

1. Existing alternative names.

Names of the language 

Until the 1930s, the Nanai language was called Goldi after the exoethnonym goldi . Most Nanai call themselves nanai / nani (from nai 'earth man', i.e. local person) or khedenai / hozen (from khede nai 'lower river man', i.e. a person living in the lower reaches of the river Amur). They call their language either nanai/nani or khede/khezhe . The Nanai living in the basins of the Ussuri and Bikin rivers call themselves monai/munei . The origin of this name is not entirely clear.

2. General characteristics

2.1. Number of native speakers and the corresponding ethnic group

According to the All-Russian Population Census of 2010, there are 12,003 Nanai living in Russia. Of these, 1,347 people indicated that they speak the Nanai language. It must be borne in mind though that native speakers are fluent in the language to varying degrees: some understand Nanai, but cannot speak it; others know some basic words and can construct simple sentences; only about a quarter (about 300 people) can speak Nanai fluently.

2.2. Sociolinguistic characteristics

The Nanai language is endangered. All native speakers of Nanai are fluent in Russian and actively use this language. Nanai is occasionally used in everyday communication, mainly by representatives of the older generation. The degree of commonality of the Nanai language depends on the village and its ethnic homogeneity (in general, the higher the proportion of the Nanai in a settlement, the better the state of preservation of the language). At the moment, there aren’t any Nanai under 50 years of age for whom Nanai was the first language acquired in childhood and who use it in everyday communication. Representatives of the older generation will only use the Nanai language when communicating with friends or relatives, interspersing Nanai phrases with Russian. At the same time, native speakers, as well as language activists, sometimes speak Nanai not only among themselves, but also with children, thanks to which some children master basic phrases (Russian is the first language all Nanai children acquire nowadays). The Nanai language is also used in WhatsApp and Internet chats.

Nanai is taught as a separate subject in schools in ethnic villages; this program is carried out in all grades (1 to 11). Nanai language teachers are trained at the Institute of Peoples of the North of the Herzen State Pedagogical University of St. Petersburg, as well as at the annual training courses in Khabarovsk. In addition to educational literature, literary texts are regularly published in the language: folklore, works of Nanai poets and writers (Nikolai Beldy, Akim Samara, Ermish Samara, etc.).

In most ethnic villages there are amateur groups and ensembles. They stage various performances related to traditional culture, including songs and plays in the Nanai language.

Nanai is currently not used in the media. From 2015 to 2017, the channel “Russia 24 Khabarovsk” used to broadcast a television program “Nanai Boani” in the Nanai language. Until 2017, the “Aborigen” magazine and the “Post Khabarovka” newspaper published texts in Nanai. The language is practically not-existent in the urban and rural man-made landscape (signs, street names, etc.). One exception is a chain of grocery stores in Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Khabarovsk, called “Amba”, which in Nanai means “tiger” or “evil spirit”. At the moment, a number of activists are engaged in the revival of the Nanai language and culture.

2.3. Information about a writing system (if applicable)

The Nanai language has a linguistic norm that is used in the preparation of educational materials. It is based on the Naikhin (Naykhin) dialect, which geographically occupies a central position. The alphabet is based on Cyrillic letters. The current version of the spelling standard was approved in 1993. The first attempts to create a Nanai writing system date back to the end of the 19th century. In 1884, missionary Prokopiy Protodyakonov published “The Goldi alphabet for teaching Goldi and Gilyak children” (the Nivkh were then called Gilyaks, and the Nanai Goldi). However, at that time most of the Nanai remained illiterate. Later, in the 1920s in Leningrad, at the Institute of the Peoples of the North, a new system was developed based on Latin alphabet, with the participation of Taisia Petrova and Valentin Avrorin. Finally, in 1932, as part of the program for creation of a unified alphabet for the peoples of the USSR, the Nanai alphabet was made official, but soon, in 1937, it was replaced by a new one based on Cyrillic letters. Subsequently, the Nanai alphabet underwent only minor changes, in 1958 and 1993. 2.4. Dialectal situation

Most of the dialects of the Nanai language are found along the Amur River (some of the Amur Nanai now live on Sakhalin Island). The Ussuri (or Bikin) dialect stands apart. Its speakers live in the north of the Primorsky Territory in the basin of the Ussuri and Bikin. It is linguistically the most distant from the rest of the Nanai dialects. Also, the Bikin dialect is not completely mutually intelligible with the other dialects of the Nanai language, which sometimes raises the question of granting it a status of a separate language. At the moment there are no people left who speak this dialect fluently except for several older people who can understand it.

All the other dialects are much closer to each other both linguistically and geographically. They represent a dialect continuum and it is often impossible to draw a clear boundary between two neighboring dialects. All of them are mutually intelligible. They are usually divided into two large groups: the Central Amur and the Lower Amur dialects. The Central Amur group includes the Sikachi-Alyan, Naikhin (Naykhin), and Dzhuen dialects. The Lower Amur group consists of the Bolon, Ekon and Gorin dialects. The Naikhin and Dzhuen dialects are the best preserved ones.

The origin of the Gorin dialect is interesting. The Gorin Nanai are descendants of the Samagirs, one of the northern Manchu-Tungus peoples, close to the Negidals. The Samagirs came from the west and settled on the banks of the Gorin, the left tributary of the river Amur. As a result of contacts with the Amur Nanai, they switched to the Nanai language, but their dialect still retain some rare features of the northern Manchu-Tungus languages (Negidal, Evenki), absent in other dialects of the Nanai language.

Previously, the Nanai language also included the Kur-Urmi dialect of the Kur and Urmi river basin, the Hezhe dialect in China, as well as the Ulchi dialect, widespread in the lower reaches of the Amur. Now they are all recognized as independent languages. Currently though Kur-Urmi and Hezhe are almost extinct and it is not known whether there is a single speaker of these languages left. The state of the Ulchi language is comparable to the Nanai language (with the exception that in general there are much fewer Ulchi than Nanai).

3. Geographical characteristics

3.1. Constituent entities of the Russian Federation with ethnic communities.

The majority of the Nanai live in the Khabarovsk Territory in the Nanaisky, Amursky, Komsomolsky and Solnechny districts. The Ussuri Nanai live in the Bikinsky district of the Khabarovsk Territory and the Pozharsky district of the Primorsky Territory.

3.2. Total number of native settlements 

20

3.3. List of main native settlements

It is difficult to indicate the exact number of native speakers for each locality. Firstly, all the Nanai speak the language to very different degrees, and it is hard to draw a clear line between those who speak it and those who do not. Secondly, there is no current data for some of the settlements.

4. Historical dynamics

The first census was carried out in 1897, but it is difficult to determine the number of the Nanai (called the Goldi at that time) based on it, and even more so the number of actual speakers. Neither the Goldi nor the Goldi language was mentioned in the census results. In all likelihood, the Goldi language was recorded as Tungus along with some other Manchu-Tungus languages (and, accordingly, nationalities), such as the Evenki, Negidal and Even languages.

Other censuses allow one to see a gradual reduction in the number of speakers: if in 1926, apparently, all the Nanai spoke the Nanai language, in the 1970s, only about 60% of the people reported linguistic proficiency, and in 2010 only 10% indicated their knowledge of the language. It is necessary to take into account, though, that census data do not always accurately reflect reality: the results may depend on the wording of the questions, the self-identification of the respondents and many other parameters. Thus, it has already been noted that the number of people who could speak Nanai fluently in 2010 is overestimated. Some could have marked the Nanai language as their native language solely because of their nationality, while in fact speaking only Russian. Yet, despite the fact that the data may not be entirely correct, the general dynamic of the strong decline in the number of Nanai language speakers corresponds to the currently observed state of affairs.

Linguistic data.

1. Position in the genealogy of the world languages

The Nanai language, together with Ulch and Uilta (Orok), forms the Nani (Amur) group of the Manchu-Tungus language family. The closest to the Nani group is the Udege group, which includes the Udege and Oroch languages. In some classifications, these two groups are combined into one southern branch of the Manchu-Tungus languages (in other classifications this branch is called central).

2. Dialectal situation

The Nanai language includes Ussuri and a number of Amur dialects. The Amur dialects are Sikachi-Alyan, Naikhin, Dzhuen, Bolon, Ekon and Gorin. Dialectal differences are present at all linguistic levels. The consonants /ʨ/ and /ʥ/ are used in Naikhin and other dialects downstream of the Amur; they correspond to /ʦ/ and /ʣ/ upstream of the Amur and in the Ussuri dialect. Also, the Ussuri dialect and partly the Sikachi-Alyan dialect have phoneme /f/, which turns into /p/ in other dialects. At the grammatical level, noticeable differences appear, for example, in the system of negation. For example, nominal negation in the Lower Amur dialects is expressed by keve/keuke , and by aba in the other dialects. The Gorin dialect uses suffix - doki as the indicator of the ablative case, which corresponds to -- dia ( di ) in most other dialects. The most notable dialect differences are found at the lexical level. For example, the word “hare” is translated into the Naikhin Nanai as gormakhon , and into the Gorin Nanai as toksa .