Kamas language

Kamas () is an extinct Samoyedic language formerly spoken by the Kamasins. It is included by convention in the Southern Samoyedic group together with Mator and Selkup (although this does not constitute a subfamily). The last native speaker of Kamas, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989. It has been noted that at present a few activists still have knowledge of the Kamasin language, however. Kamas was spoken in Russia, north of the Sayan Mountains, by Kamasins. The last speakers lived mainly in the village of Abalakovo, where they moved from the mountains in the 18th to 19th centuries. Prior to its extinction, the language had been strongly influenced by Turkic and Yeniseian languages.

The term Koibal is used as the ethnonym for the Kamas people who shifted to the Turkic Khakas language. The modern Koibal people are mixed Samoyed–Khakas–Yeniseian. The Kamas language was documented by Kai Donner in his trips to Siberia along with other Samoyedic languages, but the first documentation attempts started in the 1740s. In 2016 the university of Tartu published a Kamas e-learning book.

History

The Kamasins had never been a large group, and they lived a nomadic life, living next to Turkic and Yeniseian tribes. In the middle of the 17th century, Sayan Samoyeds started to assimilate into Turkic peoples and Kamas was the only one to survive until investigators came, such as Castrén and Kai Donner. Due to many hardships in Russia, Kai Donner was virtually certain that he would be the last one to investigate the Kamas language before it went extinct. Already in the middle of the 20th century it was thought Kamas had died. However it was later found there was still one speaker of Kamas left: Klavdiya Plotnikova. The Kamas speakers also assimilated into the Russians, as well as being turkicized. In the 20th century half of the Kamas people were born to Russian mothers, due to a higher death-rate of girls, which caused much influence to come from the Russian language. After the Russian Civil War, usage of the Kamas language started to fall drastically. The Eagle dialect was the most dominant Kamas dialect.

Kamas has both palatalized and palatal phonemes.

Consonants

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+Consonants according to Klumpp

! colspan="2" rowspan="3" |

! colspan="2" rowspan="2" |Bilabial

! colspan="3" |Coronal

! rowspan="3" |Palatal

! rowspan="3" |Velar

! rowspan="3" |Laryngeal

! colspan="2" |Dental

! rowspan="2" |Post- alveolar

!plain

!pal.

!plain

!pal.

! colspan="2" |Nasal

! rowspan="2" |Plosive/ Affricate1

!voiceless

!voiced

! rowspan="2" |Fricative

!voiceless

!voiced

| 1

! colspan="2" |Trill

! colspan="2" |Glide

! colspan="2" |Lateral

K. Donner also mentioned a sound and a f sound that was used in loanwords. Kamas also had aspiration.

ɣ seems to have been an allophone of g for some speakers.

Vowels

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"

|+Vowels