Nivkh (/ˈniːfk/ NEEFK; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, Nivhgu dif, /ɲivxɡu dif/), or Gilyak (/ˈɡɪljæk/ GIL-yak),[2] or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages[3][4] spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer 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.
There is a high degree of variability of usage among Nivkhs depending on village, clan, and even the individual speaker.
Michael Fortescue suggested in 1998 that Nivkh might be related to the Mosan languages of North America.
[16] Juha Janhunen suggests the possibility that similar consonant stop systems in Koreanic and Nivkh may be due to ancient contact.
[17] The Nivkh people have lived, by many accounts for thousands of years, on the island of Sakhalin and the Amur River.
They maintained trade with the neighboring Ainu, Japanese, and Chinese, until Russian contact, which began in the 17th century.
[18][20] Many Nivkh were forcibly displaced from their more widely spread settlements to Nogliki, a small city, in the process of centralization.
In some transitive verbs, the process has been noted to apparently run in reverse (fricatives/trills fortiting to stops, with the same distribution).
At the beginning of a syllable, the letters Е, Ё, Ю, Я stands for /je, jo, ju, ja/.
For example, morphemes that express spatial relationships (prepositions or postpositions in many other languages) are incorporated into the noun to which they relate.
[28] As Russian has become the dominant language in all spheres of life, Nivkh grammar has changed in the last century.
For example, Nivkh has recently begun to mark plurals on counting nouns and pairs, a change that originated from the grammar rules of Russian.
Simplification has occurred past borrowed Russian structure, though; due to disuse of the language and a changing culture, many of the complex morphological aspects of Nivkh have been simplified or fallen out of use.
Linguists believe the vocabulary shared between the Ainu language and Nivkh (historically spoken in the northern half of Sakhalin and on the Asian mainland facing it) is due to borrowing.
The aspirated sound [chʰ] is pronounced by drawing the tongue in and opening the teeth slightly on a sharp exhale.
Hilx əŋg mi ɲiɲaq təvə-gu-ta ari hava ŋəɣs-ku tʰaʁr-ux pʰova kutli-roχ cəu [cʰ] tʰat it-t pʰu-gu-ta.