Khanty language

Khanty or Xanty language, also known previously as the Ostyak language, is a language of the Khant peoples. It is spoken in Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous okrugs, as well as in Aleksandrovsky and Kargosoksky districts of Tomsk Oblast in Russia. According to the 1994 Salminen and 1994 Janhunen study, there were 12,000 Khanty-speaking people in Russia.

The Khanty language is known to have a large number of dialects. The western group of dialects includes the Obdoria, Ob, and Irtysh dialects. The eastern group of dialects includes the Surgut and Vakh-Vasyugan dialects, which, in turn, are subdivided into thirteen other dialects. All these dialects significantly differ from each other by their phonetic, morphological, and lexical features – to the extent that the three main "dialects" (the northern group as the third) are mutually unintelligible. Thus, based on their significant multifactorial differences western and eastern Khanty could be considered individual but closely related languages.

Alphabet

Cyrillic (version as of 2000)



Cyrillic (version as of 1958)



Latin (1931–1937)

History of the literary language

The Khanty written language was first created after the October Revolution on the basis of the Latin script in 1930, and then with the Cyrillic alphabet (with the additional letter <ң> for ) from 1937. Khanty literary works are usually written with the use of three dialects, such as the Kazym, Shuryshkar, and middle-Ob dialects. Newspaper...
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