Mansi | |
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маньси/моаньсь | |
Native to | Russia |
Region | Khanty–Mansi |
Ethnicity | 12,300 Mansi (2010 census) |
Native speakers
|
940 (2010 census) |
Uralic
|
|
Dialects |
|
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 |
|
Glottolog | mans1258 |
The Mansi language (previously, Vogul and also Maansi) is spoken by the Mansi people in Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Sverdlovsk Oblast. According to the 1989 census, there were 3,184 Mansi-speaking people in Russia.
The base dialect of the Mansi literary language is the Sosva dialect, a representative of the northern dialect. The discussion below is based on the standard language. Fixed word order is typical in Mansi. Adverbials and participles play an important role in sentence construction. The written language was first published in 1868 and was revised using a form of Cyrillic in 1937.
Mansi is subdivided into four main dialect groups which are to a large degree mutually unintelligible, and therefore best considered four languages. A primary split can be set up between the Southern variety and the remainder. A number of features are also shared between the Western and Eastern varieties, while certain later sound changes have diffused between Eastern and Northern (and are also found in some neighboring dialects of Northern Khanty to the east).
Individual dialects are known according to the rivers their speakers live(d) on:
Southern Mansi (Tavdin) (†)
North Vagilsk
South Vagilsk
Lower Lozva
Middle Lozva
Lower Konda
Middle Konda
Upper Konda
Upper Lozva