Nanai (Нанай/Nanaj)

Nanai belongs to the Southern (Amur, or Nanai) branch of the Manchu-Tungus languages. It is spoken by about 5,000 speakers in Siberia, specifically in the Khabarovsk and Primorye territories, and in the Poronay district of the Sakhalin region of the Russia Federation. A slightly different dialect, known as Hezhen (赫哲语), is spoken along the Amur River in the North Eastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang (黑龙江).

Nanai was first written in the 1930s with a version of the Latin alphabet. Since 1937 it has been written with the version of the Cyrillic alphabet shown below.

Nanai alphabet

The letters in blue are only used in Russian names and loanwords

Information on pronunciation compiled by Wolfram Siegel

Links

Information about the Nanai language
http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/Russia/bibl/Nanai.html
http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_language.asp?code=GLD

Information about the Nanai people
http://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/nanais.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanai
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ea210/maritime.htm
http://www.narodru.ru/peoples1247.html (in Russian)

Nanai phrases with Russian equivalents
http://www.geocities.jp/zaikisuke/nanai.htm

Related languages

Azerbaijani, Balkar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Even, Evenki, Gagauz, Karakalpak, Kazak, Kumyk, Kyrghyz, Nanai, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, Uzbek, Yakut

Other languages written with the Cyrillic alphabet