ABSTRACT
Nivkh is a linguistic isolate spoken in the lower reaches of the Amur River and on the northern part of the island of Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East. In Western literature, Nivkh is often referred to as “Gilyak”. In Russia, this term is regarded as derogatory, being associated with the image of the Nivkh as uncivilized (illiterate, eating raw fish, etc.). The Nivkh themselves prefer the self-referent form Nivkh [ɲivx] (“human being”). In the latest census, held in 2010, 4,652 persons identified themselves as Nivkh. Of these, 2,149 live in the Khabarovsk region and 2,290 on Sakhalin (Federal’naia Sluzhba Gosudarstvennoi Statistiki 2013). In our contribution to this volume, we examine Nivkh against the backdrop of
the sociolinguistic variable of language vitality, with special focus on literacy. Literacy and associated aspects such as publication and education are closely related to political, economic and cultural power (see, e.g., Fishman 2003; Coulmas and Guerini 2012), and are therefore considered important indicators of language vitality (Grenoble and Whaley 1998). Nevertheless, a language with a high literacy rate may be faced with a declining number of speakers. As we will see, Nivkh is one such language. In common with other indigenous languages of Russia, the introduction of literacy
in the vernacular language began in the 1930s, when Nivkh still had many speakers. We believe that this early initiative, while in itself unsuccessful, lay the foundation for the recent upsurge in Nivkh writing practices. Interestingly, these writing practices were undertaken when there were only few Nivkh speakers remaining, and Nivkh had ceased to be the language of daily communication. Models of language vitality, for example that of Giles et al. (1977), would depict the current situation as scoring high on literacy variables (such as “institutional support”), but low on other variables (such as “demography” and “status”). Given that the variables subsumed under language vitality are normally correlated (e.g. Meyerhoff 2011: 115), Nivkh
presents an interesting case, which suggests that “writing” is a more complex variable than is often assumed in sociolinguistic work.
