Nganasan: A fresh focus on a little known Arctic language

Abstract

e-book).Nganasan is a language of considerable interest for both Uralic studies and general linguistic typology. Spoken on Taimyr Peninsula in Arctic Siberia, it is not only the easternmost surviving Uralic language, but also the northernmost language of Eurasia, and even globally second only to some varieties of Inuit. Conventionally classified as a member of the "northern" group of Samoyedic, it is more correctly understood as representing the first offshoot of Proto-Samoyedic, which started moving northward along the Yenisei some two millennia ago and reached Taimyr at least several centuries ago. Nganasan retains some archaic lexical and grammatical features replaced by secondary innovations shared by all the other Samoyedic languages. At the same time, due to its geographical location it probably includes a substantial amount of relatively recent substrate material from the subsequently lost languages spoken previously on Taimyr.