The Ket language, or more specifically Imbak and formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family. It is spoken along the middle Yenisei basin by the Ket people. The language is threatened with extinction—the number of ethnic Kets that are native speakers of the language dropped from 1,225 in 1926 to 537 in 1989. According to the UNESCO census, this number has since fallen to 150. A 2005 census reported 485 native speakers, but this number is suspected to be inflated. Another Yeniseian language, Yugh, is believed to have recently become extinct.
Documentation
The earliest observations about the language were published by P. S. Pallas in 1788 in a travel diary. M.A. Castrén was one of the last known to study the Kot language. Castrén lived beside the Kan river with five people of Kott, in which is believed was the last remaining people who spoke the language. In 1858, M. A. Castrén published the first grammar and dictionary, which also included material on the Kot language. During the 19th century, the Ket were mistaken for a tribe of the Finno-Ugric Khanty. A. Karger in 1934 published the first grammar, as well as a Ket primer, and a new treatment appeared in 1968, written by A. Kreinovich.
Phonology
Vowels
The normally open-mid and are pronounced as close-mid and, respectively, when they have the high-steady tone.
freely varies between,,, and.
Consonants
Vajda analyses Ket as having only 12 consonant phonemes: It is one of the few languages to lack both and, along with Arapaho, Goliath and Efik, as well as classical Arabic and some modern Arabic dialects. There is much allophony, and the phonetic inventory of consonants is essentially as below. This is the level of description reflected by the Ket alphabet. Furthermore, all nasal consonants in Ket have voiceless allophones at the end of a monosyllabic word with a glottalized or descending tone, likewise, becomes in the same situation. Alveolars are often pronounced laminal and possibly palatalized, though not in the vicinity of a uvular consonant. is normally pronounced with affrication, as.
Tone
Descriptions of Ket vary widely in the number of contrastive tones they report: as many as eight and as few as zero have been counted. Given this wide disagreement, whether or not Ket is a tonal language is debatable, although recent works by Ket specialists Edward Vajda and Stefan Georg defend the existence of tone. In tonal descriptions, Ket does not employ a tone on every syllable but instead uses one tone per word. Following Vajda's description of Southern Ket, the five basic tones are as follows:
Tone name
Glottalized
High-Even
Rising Falling
Falling
Rising High-Falling
Tone contour
Example
"person"
"blood"
"hand sled"
"elk"
"mallard ducks"
The glottalized tone features pharyngeal or laryngeal constriction, or a full glottal stop that interrupts the vowel. Georg's 2007 description of Ket tone is similar to the above, but reduces the basic number of tonemes to four, while moving the rising high-falling tone plus a variant to a class of tonemes only found in multisyllabic words. With some exceptions caused by certain prefixes or clitics, the domain of tones in a multisyllabic word is limited to the first two syllables.
Incorporation
Ket makes significant use of incorporation. Incorporation is not limited to nouns, and can also include verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and bound morphemes found only in the role of incorporated elements. Incorporation also occurs as both a lexicalized process - the combination of verb and incorporate being treated as a distinct lexical element, with a meaning often based around the incorporated element - and a paradigmatic one, where the incorporation is performed spontaneously for particular semantic and pragmatic effect Forms of incorporation include:
Nominal incorporation, most commonly used to describe the instrumental part of an action, but sometimes used to describe patients instead. Instrumental incorporation doesn't affect the transitivity of the verb, while patient incorporation can make a transitive verbintransitive. Patient incorporation is usually used for patients that are wholly effected by an action ; more generally affected patients are typically incorporated only when significantly defocused or backgrounded.
Verbal incorporation, more specifically the incorporation of verbal infinitives into the verb complex. This form of incorporation is used to signify aspect and form causatives. Incorporated infinitives may bring incorporated elements of their own into the verb as well.
Adjectival incorporation, with an incorporated adjective describing the target or final state of an action.
Adverbial incorporation, where a local adverb is used to describe the direction or path of a movement.
Ket alphabet
In the 1930s a Latin-based alphabet was developed and used: In the 1980s a new, Cyrillic-based, alphabet was created:
Decline and current use
Ket people were subjected to collectivization and then eventually sent to Russian-only boarding schools from the 1930s to 1960s. Now, Ket is taught as a subject in some primary schools, but only older adults are fluent and few are raising their children with the language. Kellog, Russia is the only place where Ket is still taught in schools. Special books are provided for grades second through fourth but after those grades there is only Russian Literature to read that describes Ket culture. There are no known monolingual speakers for now. Alexander Kotusov was a Ket folk singer and poet who died in 2019.
Literature
Kotorova, Elizaveta, and Andrey Nefedov . Comprehensive Ket Dictionary / Большой словарь кетского языка. Languages of the World/Dictionaries 57. Munich: Lincom Europa.
