Ingrian language

Ingrian is classified, together with Finnish, Karelian (including Livvi), Ludic and Veps, in the Northern Finnic branch of the Uralic languages.

In 1932–1937, a Latin-based orthography for the Ingrian language existed, taught in schools of the Soikino Peninsula and the area around the mouth of the Luga River.[4] Several textbooks were published, including in 1936 a grammar of the language. However, in 1937 the Izhorian written language was abolished and mass repressions of the peasantry began.[4]

Four dialects groups of Ingrian have been attested, two of which are probably extinct by now:[6][7]

• Hevaha, spoken along Kovashi River and nearby coastal areas (†)
• Soikkola, spoken on Soikinsky Peninsula and along Sista River
• Ylä-Laukaa (Upper Luga or Oredezhi), spoken along Orodezh River and the upper Luga River (†)
• Ala-Laukaa (Lower Luga), a divergent dialect influenced by Votic

A fifth dialect may have once been spoken on the Karelian Isthmus in northernmost Ingria, and may have been a substrate of local dialects of southeastern Finnish.[6]

Like other Uralic languages, Ingrian is a highly agglutinative language. Ingrian inflection is exclusively performed using inflectional suffixes, with prefixes being only used in derivation.

Ingrian nouns and adjectives are inflected for number (singular and plural) and case. Ingrian nominals distinguish between twelve cases, with a thirteenth (the comitative) only being present in nouns. Like Finnish, Ingrian has two cases used for the direct object: the nominative-genitive (used in telic constructions) and the partitive (used in atelic constructions). Ingrian adjectives often have a separate comparative form, but lack a morphologically distinct superlative.

Ingrian distinguishes between three persons. There is no distinction in gender, but there is an animacy distinction in interrogative pronouns.

Ingrian verbs feature four moods: indicative, conditional, imperative and the now rare potential. Verbs are inflected for three persons, two numbers and a special impersonal form for each of the moods, although the imperative lacks a first person form. The indicative has both present and past forms. Negation in Ingrian is expressed by means of a negative verb that inflects by person and has separate imperative forms.

The Ingrian language has several morphophonological processes.

Vowel harmony is the process that the affixes attached to a lemma may change depending on the stressed vowel of the word. This means that if the word is stressed on a back vowel, the affix would contain a back vowel as well, while if the word's stress lies on a front vowel, the affix would naturally contain a front vowel. Thus, if the stress of a word lies on an "a", "o" or "u", the possible affix vowels would be "a", "o" or "u", while if the stress of a word lies on an "ä", "ö" or "y", the possible affix vowels to this word would then be "ä", "ö" or "y":

nappi (button, nominativa); nappia (button, partitiva)

näppi (pinch, nominativa); näppiä (pinch, partitiva)

The vowels "e" and "i" are neutral, that is to say that they can be used together with both types of vowels.

• Paul Ariste 1981. Keelekontaktid. Tallinn: Valgus. [pt. 2.6. Kolme läänemere keele hääbumine lk. 76 – 82] (in Estonian)
• A. Laanest. 1993. Ižorskij Jazyk. In V. N. Jartseva (ed.), Jazyki Mira: Ural'skie Jazyki, 55–63. Moskva: Nauka.

Wiktionary has a category on Ingrian lemmas.

Ingrian language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• Ingrian verb conjugation
• Ingrian language resources at Giellatekno
• INKEROIN KEEL УЧЕБНОЕ ПОСОБИЕ ПО ИЖОРСКОМУ ЯЗЫКУ