Khanty language

Khanty or Xanty language, also known as the Ostyak language, is a language of the Khant peoples. It is spoken in Khantia-Mansia, Yamalia, Alexandrovsky and Kargosoksky Districts of Tomsk Oblast in Russia. According to the 1970 census, there were over 14,000 Khanty-speaking people in Russia. The Khanty and Mansi languages are the Ob Ugric (Ob Ugrian) members of the Finno-Ugric languages.

The Khanty language is known to have a large number of dialects. The western group of dialects includes the Obdorian, Ob’, and Irtysh dialects. The eastern group of dialects includes the Surgut and Vakh-Vasyugan dialects, which, in turn, are subdivided into thirteen other dialects. All these dialects significantly differ from each other by their phonetical, morphological, and lexical features.

The Khanty written language was first created after the October Revolution on the basis of the Latin script in 1930, and then with the Cyrillic alphabet (with the additional letter <ң> for ) from 1937. Khanty literary works are usually written with the use of three dialects, such as the Kazym, Shuryshkar, and middle-Ob dialects. Newspaper reporting and TV and radio broadcasting are usually done in the Kazymian dialect.

Vakh dialect

The Vakh dialect is divergent. It has rigid vowel harmony and a tripartite (ergative-accusative) case system: The agent ("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 agent, as in nominative-accusative systems.

Ob’ dialect

The Ob’ phonemic inventory is , short vowels , long vowels , and a reduced vowel which is never word-initial. Unlike Vakh, it does not have vowel harmony.

The noun

The nominal suffixes include dual ', plural ', dative ', locative/instrumental '.

For example:

xot "house" (Hungarian ház, Finnish koti "home")

xotŋəna "to the two houses"

xotətnə "at the houses" (cf. Finnish kotona "at home", kodot "homes").

Singular, dual, and plural possessive suffixes may be added to singular, dual, and plural nouns, in three persons, for 3³ = 27 forms. A few, from məs "cow", are:

məsem "my cow"

məsemən "my 2 cows"

məsew "my cows"

məstatən "the 2 of our cows"

məsŋətuw "our 2 cows"

Pronouns

The personal pronouns are, in the nominative case:

	SG	DU	PL
1st person	ma	min	muŋ
2nd person	naŋ	nən	naŋ
3rd person	tuw	tən	təw

The case of ma are accusative manət and dative manəm.

The demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are:

tamə "this", tomə "that", sit "that yonder": tam xot "this house".

Basic interrogative pronouns are:

xoy "who?", muy "what?"

Numerals

Khanty numerals, compared with Hungarian, are:

	Khanty	Hungarian
1	yit, yiy	egy
2	katn, kat	kettő, két
3	xutəm	három
4	nyatə	négy
5	wet	öt
6	xut	hat
7	tapət	hét
8	nəvət	nyolc
9	yaryaŋ (= short of ten?)	kilenc
10	yaŋ	tíz
11	yixosyaŋ (1 and 10)
12	katxosyaŋ (2 and 10)
20	xus	húsz
30	xutəmyaŋ (3 tens)
100	sot	száz

Except for "ten" and the compound forms, these are quite similar in the two languages. Note also the regularity of "house" and "hundred".

Syntax

Both Khanty and Mansi are basically nominative-accusative languages, but have innovative morphological ergativity. In an ergative construction, the object is given the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb, and the locative is used for the agent of the transitive verb (as an instrumental) . This may be used with some specific verbs, for example "to give": the literal anglicisation would be "by me (subject) a fish (object) gave to you (indirect object)" for the equivalent of the sentence "I gave a fish to you". However, the ergative is morphological (marked using a case) only, not syntactic, so that, in addition, these may be passivized in a way resembling English. For example, in Mansi, "a dog (agent) bit you (object)" could be reformatted as "you(object) were bitten, by a dog(instrument)".