Southern Mansi language

Southern or Tavda Mansi is an extinct Uralic language spoken in Russia in the Sverdlovsk Oblast. Its main records come from an area isolated from the other Mansi varieties along the river Tavda.^[4] Around 1900, about 200 speakers existed, but in the 1960s, it was spoken only by a few elderly speakers.^[5] It has since then become extinct. It had strong Tatar lexical influence and displayed several archaisms such as vowel harmony, retention of /æː/ (elsewhere backed to /aː/ or diphthongized), /ɑː/ (elsewhere raised to /oː/)^[6] and /tsʲ/ (elsewhere deaffricated to /sʲ/).^{[citation needed]}

Southern Mansi
Tavda Mansi
mäńši~mäˈnči ľė̄χ~ľäχ~ľäŋ[1]
Pronunciation	[mæɲʃi~mæ̍nt͡ʃi ľėːχ~lʲæχ~lʲæŋ]
Native to	Russia
Region	Sverdlovsk Oblast
Extinct	1960s
Language family	Uralic Finno-Ugric? Ugric? Ob-Ugric? Mansi Southern Mansi
Dialects	Tavda Tagil Tura Chusovaya (all extinct)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	sout3253
Traditional distribution and current Mansi settlements[2][3]
Southern Mansi is classified as Extinct by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010)
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Russian researchers use the term "southern dialect" (Russian: южный диалект) to describe the Tavda language.^[4]

Varieties and documentation

Southern Mansi was formerly spoken along a range to both the west and east of the Ural Mountains. Wordlists of Southern Mansi have been recorded across this area in the 18th century from the towns of Kungur, Verkhnyaya Tura and Verkhoturye and from settlements along the Chusovaya River and Tagil River.^[7] Only the Tavda dialect was met and recorded (from three villages: Janychkova, Chandyri and Gorodok) on the expeditions of the Hungarian linguist Bernát Munkácsi [hu] in 1888–1889 and the Finnish linguist Artturi Kannisto [fi] in 1901–1906. During 1960s expeditions by Hungarian linguists, it, too, was found to be moribund, and is presumed to have become extinct shortly afterwards.