On the Current State of the Khamnigan Languages and Ethnicity

The Khamnigan are a small ethnic group that was once locally dominant in the Onon and Argun river basins, a region today politically divided between Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. Historically also known as the “Horse Tungus of Transbaikalia”, the Khamnigan are characterized by a rare type of ethnic bilingualism, in which two different languages, Khamnigan Mongol (Mongolic) and Khamnigan Ewenki (Tungusic), have been transmitted for several generations within a single ethnic group. Khamnigan Ewenki, which was first documented in two varieties by the Finnish linguist M. A. Castrén (1856), may be taxonomically placed in the context of the Ewenki language, as spoken widely in Siberia, while Khamnigan Mongol is today recognized as a separate ethnospecific Mongolic language whose principal property is that it lacks most of the Post-Proto-Mongolic innovations that distinguish its closest neighbours – Khalkha and Buryat – from each other and from other Mongolic languages. Khamnigan Mongol was first studied by the Buryat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano in the early 20th century, but most of his results remained unpublished at the time. It was only with the field work carried out by the Hungarian folklorist Katalin Uray-Kőhalmi (1959) that the Khamnigan became more widely known to the international scholarly community.

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