Language Profile: Ket
What is the language called in English and the language itself?
Ket, Imbak, Imbatski-Ket, Keto, Yenisei Ostyak
Where is the language spoken?
It is spoken along the middle Yenisei basin, Siberia, Russian Federation.
How many people speak the language? Is it endangered?
Ket has about 200 native speakers, mostly elderly people; the language is definitely endangered
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages?
Ket is the last surviving member of the Yeniseian language family. Its sister languages Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, Pumpokol, Jie all became extinct in the 16th to 18th centuries, only Yugh survived into the 1990s.
What writing system does the language use?
Traditionally, the language is/was not written.
The Cyrillic alphabet has been used since the 1980s, although a Latin orthography had been devised in the 1930s.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have? What is its typological profile?
Head-marking, postpositional, SOV
both suffixes and prefixes, prefixes are slightly preferred
three grammatical genders
strong verbal and nominal morphology with many grammatical cases
agglutinative, with incorporation (pyólysynthesis)
What does the language sound like?
It is one of the few languages of the world lacking /p/ and /g/
it is a tonal language with up to five basic tones
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ket_language
https://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_ket
