The Mansi language (also Vogul, although this is obsolete, and "Maansi") is a language of the Mansi people. It is spoken in territories of Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, including the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug and the Sverdlovsk Oblast. According to the 1989 census, there were 3,184 Mansi-speaking people in Russia.
The base dialect of the Mansi literary language is the Sosva dialect, a representative of the northern dialect; the discussion below is based on the standard language. Fixed word order is typical in Mansi. Adverbials and participles play an important role in sentence construction. The written language was first published in 1868 and in 1937 was revised using a form of Cyrillic.
The Mansi language is subdivided into four main dialects which are to a large degree mutually unintelligible, and therefore best considered four languages.
Northern Mansi (Sosva, Upper Lozyvin) has strong Russian, Komi, Nenets, and Northern Khanty influence. There is no accusative case; that is, both the nominative and accusative roles are unmarked on the noun. */æ/ and */æː/ have been backed to [a] and [aː].
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