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Nenets (in former work also Yurak) is a pair of closely related languages spoken in northern Russia by the Nenets people. They are often treated as being two dialects of the same language, but they are very different and mutual intelligibility is low.
The Nenets language is on the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family, with two major dialects, Forest Nenets and Tundra Nenets. Ethnologue says that in Siberia, most young people are still fluent in Nenets, whereas in European Russia, they tend to speak Russian. Overall, the majority of native speakers are from older generations.
About 95% of Nenets speakers speak Tundra Nenets. Nenets first appeared in written form in the 1830s in religious texts published by Venyamin Smirnov, an archimandrite or superior bishop in the Eastern Orthodox church.
Without exception, all nomads speak Nenets as their first language. Children grow up speaking only Nenets with their families. At age seven they are sent away to boarding school in the nearest village and begin learning Russian language.
There are around 44,000 ethnic Nenets, with around 25,700 of them speaking Nenets as their native language. The Nenets language is divided into two groups: Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets. Today, these are regarded as two different languages because the differences between them are so great.
Tundra Nenets is a Uralic language spoken in European Russia and North-Western Siberia. It is the largest and best-preserved language in the Samoyedic group. [4] : 1–2. Tundra Nenets is closely related to the Nganasan and Enets languages, and more distantly to Selkup.
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The language was based loosely on pictographs for centuries, until an effort to create a written paradigm was created in the 1930s, using the Latin alphabet and Russian orthography. A rise in bilingualism of the Nentsy has made Russian the largest influence on their language.
