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Evenki ( ), or Tungus is the largest member of the northern group of Tungusic languages, a group which also includes Even language, Negidal language, and the more closely related Oroqen language. The name is sometimes wrongly given as "Evenks". It is spoken by the Evenki people or Ewenkī(s) in Russia and China.
In certain areas the influences of the Yakut language and the Buryat language languages are particularly strong. The influence of Russian in general is overwhelming (in 1979, 75.2% of the Evenkis spoke Russian, rising to 92.7% in 2002). Evenki children were forced to learn Russian at Soviet residential schools, and returned with a "poor ability to speak their mother tongue...". The Evenki language varies considerably among its dialects, which are divided into three large groups: the northern, the southern and the eastern dialects. These are further divided into minor dialects. A written language was created for Evenkis in the Soviet Union in 1931, first using a Latin script, and from 1937 a Cyrillic one. In China, Evenki is written experimentally in the Mongolian script. The language is generally considered endangered.Grenoble; Janhunen It is presently maintained by young people in only one village, Iyengra, in the southern Sakha Republic. (2025). 9783110554038, De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 9783110554038
Evenks in China also speak several dialects. According to Ethnologue, the Hihue or Hoy dialect is considered the standard; Haila'er, Aoluguya (Olguya), Chenba'erhu (Old Bargu), and Morigele (Mergel) dialects also exist. Ethnologue reports these dialects differ significantly from those in Russia.
Some works focused on individual Russia dialects include (Barguzin), (Tommot), and (Sakhalin).
| +Evenki consonants (Russian dialects) !colspan=2 | ! Labial consonant ! Dental consonant ! Alveolar ! Palatal ! Velar consonant |
The phoneme () has a word-final allophone, , as well as an intervocalic variant, . Likewise, some speakers pronounce intervocalic as . Speakers of some dialects also alternate and . Consonant inventories given by researchers working on dialects in China are largely similar. The differences noted: Chaoke and Kesingge et al. give instead of and lack , , or ; furthermore, Kesingge et al. give instead of .
| +Evenki consonants (Chinese dialects) !colspan=2 | ! Labial consonant
! Dental consonant
! Alveolar
! Post- alveolar ! Velar consonant ! Glottal |
| + Evenki vowels (Russian dialects) ! !!Front vowel !! colspan="2" | Back vowel |
The vowel inventory of the Chinese dialects of Evenki, however, is markedly different (Chaoke, 1995, 2009):
| + Evenki vowels (Chinese dialects) ! !!Front vowel !!Central vowel !! colspan="2" | Back vowel |
Like most Tungusic languages, Evenki employs back-front vowel harmony—suffix vowels are matched to the vowel in the root. However, some vowels – – and certain suffixes no longer adhere to the rules of vowel harmony. Knowledge of the rules of vowel harmony is fading, as vowel harmony is a complex topic for elementary speakers to grasp, the language is severely endangered (Janhunen), and many speakers are multilingual.
In 1930, it was decided to create a written language for the majority of the peoples of the North of the USSR. The Latin alphabet was chosen as its graphic basis. In the same year, the project of the Evenki alphabet was proposed by Ya. P. Alcor. This project differed from Vasilevich's alphabet only by the presence of letters for displaying Russian borrowings ( C c, F f, J j, W w, Z z), as well as using V v instead of W w. After some refinement, the letter Çç was replaced by C c, V v by W w, and the letter Y y was excluded. In May 1931, the Evenki romanized alphabet was officially approved, and in 1932 regular publishing began on it. The basis of the literary language was laid the most studied Nepsky dialect (north of the Irkutsk region). (2025). 9785874441913, Academia. ISBN 9785874441913
The official Latinized Evenk alphabet, in which book publishing and schooling were conducted, looked like this:
| A a | B в | C c | D d | Ʒ ʒ | E e | Ə ə | Ə̄ ə̄ | F f |
| G g | H h | I i | J j | K k | L l | M m | N n | Ņ ņ |
| Ŋ ŋ | O o | P p | R r | S s | T t | U u | W w | Z z |
Today, the official writing system in Russia for the Evenki language is the Cyrillic script. The script has one additional letter, ӈ, to indicate ; it is used only inconsistently in printed works, due to typographical limitations. Boldyrev's dictionary uses ң instead.E.g. the entry for кто; Some editions use the digraph нг. Other sounds found in Evenki but not Russian, such as , lack devoted letters. Instead д stands in for both and ; when the latter pronunciation is intended, it is followed by one of Cyrillic's iotation letters, similar to the way those letters cause palatalization of the preceding consonant in Russian. However orthographic decisions like these have resulted in some confusion and transfer of Russian phonetics to Evenki among younger speakers. For example, the spellings ди and ды were intended to record and (i.e. the same vowel sound). However, in Russian и and ы are respectively two different vowels, and . Long vowels are optionally indicated with macrons.
| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Д д | Е е | Ё ё | Ж ж |
| З з | И и | Й й | К к | Л л | М м | Н н | Ӈ ӈ |
| О о | П п | Р р | С с | Т т | У у | Ф ф | Х х |
| Ц ц | Ч ч | Ш ш | Щ щ | Ъ ъ | Ы ы | Ь ь | Э э |
| Ю ю | Я я |
Evenki in China is now written in the Latin script and experimentally in the Mongolian script. Evenki scholars made an attempt in the 1980s to create standard written forms for their language, using both Mongolian script and a pinyin-like Latin spelling. They published an Evenki–Mongolian–Chinese dictionary () with Evenki words spelled in IPA, a pinyin-like orthography, and Mongolian script, as well as a collection of folk songs in IPA and Mongolian script (and Chinese-style numbered musical notation).
The orthographic system developed by Chinese Evenki scholars reflects differences between Evenki and Mongol phonology. It uses both and (usually romanised from Mongolian as q and ɣ) for . The system uses double letters in both Mongolian and Latin to represent most long vowels; however for ao is written instead of oo. The same scholars' collection of songs has some orthographic differences from the table below; namely, long vowels are occasionally written not just doubled but also with an intervening silent letter ( ɣ), showing clear orthographic influence from the Mongolian language. In medial and final positions, t is written in the Manchu script form . Evenki itself is spelled eweŋki, despite Mongolian orthography usually prohibiting the letter combination ŋk. The vowel inventory of this system is also rather different from that of Chaoke (1995, 2009).
a /a/ | e /ə/ | y*, i /i/ | o /ʊ/ | ō /ɔ/ | u /o/ | u /u/ | * e /ə/ |
n /n/ | ng /ŋ/ | b /b/ | p /p/ | g /ɡ/ | ḡ /ɣ/ | m /m/ | l /l/ |
s /s/ | x, sh /ʃ/ | t /t/ | d /d/ | q, ch /tʃ/ | j, zh /dʐ/ | y /j/ | r /r/ |
w /w/ | f /f/ | k /k/ | h /h/ | * used only word-initially | |||
uses a different version of Latin script, which distinguishes certain vowels and consonants more clearly than the system of Kesingge ''et al.'':
| A a | B b | C c | D d | E e | Ē ē | F f | G g | Ḡ ḡ |
| H h | I i | J j | K k | L l | M m | N n | Ng ng | |
| Ō ō | O o | P p | Q q | R r | S s | T t | ||
| U u | V v | W w | X x | Y y | Z z |
| + Evenki personal indices ! !! Singular !! Plural |
Below is a table of cases and suffixes in Evenki, following Nedjalkov (1997):
| + Evenki cases and suffixes ! colspan="2" | Case !! Suffix !! Example |
| – | |
| -ja | |
| -va, -ma | |
| -vi (sg.), -ver (pl.) | |
| -ngi | |
| -duk | |
| -kle, ikle | |
| -du, -tu | |
| -tki, -tyki | |
| -la | |
| -ditk | |
| -li, -duli | |
| -t, -di | |
| -gali, -chi, -lan, -tai | |
| -ngachin, -gechin |
Plurals are marked with -il-, -l-, or -r- before the case marker, if any:
In China, there is an ethnic population of 30,500 but only 19,000 are fluent in Evenki and only around 3,000 people are monolingual in Evenki. Juha Janhunen investigated multilingualism in Hulunbuir (northern Inner Mongolia) and the adjoining section of Heilongjiang (e.g. Qiqihar) in 1996. He found that most Solon people still spoke Evenki, and about half knew the Daur language as well. Furthermore, Mongolian functioned as a lingua franca among members of all minority groups there, as they tended to do their education in Mongolian-medium schools. The only Evenki-speakers whom Janhunen knew not to speak Mongolian as a second language were the Reindeer Evenki (sometimes called "Yakut") in the northern part of Hulunbuir, who used Russian language as their "language of intercultural communication". Janhunen predicted that all of these languages, including Mongolian, were likely to lose ground to Chinese in coming years. However Chaoke noted more than a decade later that the usage rate of Evenki remained quite high, and that it was still common to find Evenki speakers who were proficient in three, four, or even five languages.
There is a small population of Mongolized Hamnigan speakers of the Hamnigan dialect of Buryat language in Mongolia as well, numbering around 1,000.
There is little information regarding revival efforts or Evenki's status now. In 1998, the language was taught in preschools and primary schools and offered as an option in 8th grade. The courses were regarded as an 'ethnocultural component' to bring Evenki language and culture into the curriculum. Instruction as a second language is also available in the Institute of the Peoples of the North at Herzen University (the former St. Petersburg State Pedagogical University). In the 1980s, Christian missionaries working in Siberia translated the Bible into Evenki and a Christian group called the Global Recordings Network recorded Christian teaching materials in Evenki.
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