LanguageExplorer, month 1, day 1

Starting today, July 27, I will be exploring the Nivkh language for one whole month.

Nivkh (Нивхгу/Nivxgu)

Nivkh or Gilyak is a language isolate spoken by about 1,000 people in Outer Manchuria along the Amgun and Amur rivers and part of Sakhlin Island:

There are three main dialects: Amur, East Sakhlin and North Sakhlin, with only limited mutally intelligibilty between them.
Nivkh is unrelated to any other language. It is, however, often included in the Paleosiberian group of languages because of our need to categorise everything.
The Nivkhs living along the Amur river call themselves Nivh. Those living on the Sakhlin are known as N'ivghn-N'ivgn, which means "man". The term Gilyak comes from the Manchus (their neighbours).
Nivkh first appeared in writing in the 1880s in a Nivkh-Nanai primer compiled by a missionary. A Latin-based alphabet for Nivkh was used between 1931 and 1953, when a switch was made to the Cyrillic alphabet:

(the blue letters are only used for Russian loanwords)

Next post will contain some history about the Nivkh language and the people who speak it.