Eastern Khanty language

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Eastern Khanty
қӑнтәк йасәӈ, ӄӑнтәк йасәӈ ḳăntək jasəṇ (Surgut)[note 1] Ӄӑнтәӽ
Native to	Russia
Region	Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug
Ethnicity	<1,000 eastern Khanty[1]
Native speakers	~1,000 (2019–2025)[2][3]
Language family	Uralic Finno-Ugric? Ugric? Khanty Eastern Khanty
Dialects	Salym Surgut Vakh-Vasyugan
Writing system	Cyrillic
Official status
Recognised minority language in	Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (all Khanty varieties)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Linguist List	1ok
	kca-eas
Glottolog	east2774  Eastern Khanty
ELP	Eastern Khanty Eastern Khanty
Map of Khanty and Mansi varieties in the early 20th century, with   Eastern Khanty

Eastern Khanty is a Uralic language, frequently considered a dialect of a Khanty language, spoken by about 1,000 people.^[4][5][6][7] The majority of these speakers speak the Surgut dialect, as the Vakh-Vasyugan and Salym varieties have been rapidly declining in favor of Russian.^[8] The former two have been used as literary languages since the late 20th century, with Surgut being more widely used due to its less isolated location and higher number of speakers.^[8]

Classification of Eastern Khanty dialects:^[9]

• Far Eastern (Vakh, Vasjugan, Verkhne-Kalimsk, Vartovskoe)
• Surgut (Jugan, Malij Jugan, Pim, Likrisovskoe, Tremjugan-Tromagan^[10])

The Vakh, Vasyugan, Alexandrovo and Yugan (Jugan) dialects have less than 300 speakers in total.^[1]

The Salym dialect can be classified as transitional between Eastern and Southern (Honti 1998 suggests closer affinity with Eastern, Abondolo 1998 in the same work with Southern). The Atlym and Nizyam dialects also show some Southern features.

Eastern Khanty [k] corresponds to [x] in the northern and southern languages.

Vakh has the richest vowel inventory, with five reduced vowels /ĕ ø̆ ə̆ ɑ̆ ŏ/ and full /i y ɯ u e ø o æ ɑ/. Some researchers also report /œ ɔ/.^[11][12]

Surgut Khanty has five reduced vowels /æ̆ ə̆ ɵ̆ ʉ̆ ɑ̆ ŏ/ and full vowels /i e a ɒ o u ɯ/.^[14]

The Khanty letters with a tick or tail at bottom, namely Қ Ԯ Ң Ҳ Ҷ, are sometimes rendered with a diagonal tail, i.e. ⟨Ӆ Ӊ⟩, and sometimes with a curved tail, i.e. ⟨Ӄ Ӈ Ԓ Ӽ⟩. However, in the case of Surgut such graphic variation needs to be handled by the font, because there are no Unicode characters to hard-code Ҷ with a diagonal tail, and Unicode has refused a request to encode a variant of Ҷ with a curved tail ( , approximated in unicode as Ч̡ч̡), the reasoning being that it would be an allograph rather than a distinct letter. (The same is true of the other curved-tail variants in Unicode; those were encoded by mistake.)^[16]

The Vakh dialect is divergent. It has rigid vowel harmony and a tripartite (ergative–accusative) case system, where the subject of a transitive verb takes the instrumental case suffix -nə-, while the object takes the accusative case suffix. The subject of an intransitive verb, however, is not marked for case and might be said to be absolutive. The transitive verb agrees with the subject, as in nominative–accusative systems.

• Bakró-Nagy, Marianne; Laakso, Johanna; Skribnik, Elena, eds. (2022-03-24). The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198767664.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-876766-4.
• Abondolo, Daniel (1998). "Khanty". In Abondolo, Daniel (ed.). The Uralic Languages.
• Honti, László (1998). "ObUgrian". In Abondolo, Daniel (ed.). The Uralic Languages.
• Csepregi, Márta (1998). Szurguti osztják chrestomathia (PDF). Studia Uralo-Altaica Supplementum. Vol. 6. Szeged. Retrieved 2014-10-11.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Filchenko, Andrey Yury (2007). A grammar of Eastern Khanty (Doctor of Philosophy thesis). Rice University. hdl:1911/20605.
• Gulya, János (1966). Eastern Ostyak chrestomathy. Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic series. Vol. 51.
• Abondolo, Daniel Mario; Valijärvi, Riitta-Liisa, eds. (2023). The Uralic languages. Routledge language family (2nd ed.). Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-315-62509-6.