Nivkh languages
Nivkh (/ˈniːfk/ NEEFK; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, Nivxgu dif, /ɲivxɡu dif/), or Gilyak (/ˈɡɪljæk/ GIL-yak), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Russian Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature.
| Nivkh languages | |
|---|---|
| Gilyak/Amursh | |
| нивх диф, нивх туғс | |
| Pronunciation | [mer ɲivx dif/tuɣs] (Amur dialect); [ɲiɣvŋ duf] (S.E. Sakhalin dialect) |
| Native to | Russian Far East, more specifically Amur Oblast, Khabarovsk Krai and Sakhalin Oblast |
| Region | Island of Sakhalin, along the lower Amur River and around the Amur Liman. Formerly, also in the Shantar Islands and parts of Amur Oblast |
| Ethnicity | 4,652 Nivkh |
Native speakers | 198 (2010 census) |
Early form | Proto-Nivkh
|
| Cyrillic, Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | niv |
| Glottolog | nivk1234 |
| ELP | |
Nivkh is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. That may have been an overcount, however, as the 2010 census recorded only 198 native speakers, less than 4% of the ethnic population.
Proto-Nivkh(ic), the proto-language ancestral to the modern-day languages, has been reconstructed by Fortescue (2016).