Kamas () is an extinct Samoyedic language formerly spoken by the Kamasins. It is included by convention in the Southern Samoyedic group together with Mator and Selkup (although this does not constitute a subfamily). The last native speaker of Kamas, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989. It has been noted that at present a few activists still have knowledge of the Kamasin language, however. Kamas was spoken in Russia, north of the Sayan Mountains, by Kamasins. The last speakers lived mainly in the village of Abalakovo, where they moved from the mountains in the 18th to 19th centuries. Prior to its extinction, the language had been strongly influenced by Turkic and Yeniseian languages.
The term Koibal is used as the ethnonym for the Kamas people who shifted to the Turkic Khakas language. The modern Koibal people are mixed SamoyedâÂÂKhakasâÂÂYeniseian. The Kamas language was documented by Kai Donner in his trips to Siberia along with other Samoyedic languages, but the first documentation attempts started in the 1740s. In 2016 the university of Tartu published a Kamas e-learning book. Linguists managed to record about 1,550 words of the Kamasin language. The grammar and vocabulary of Kamas are well documented. In 2024, a Kamas learning book was made by the Russian Geographical Society for the purpose of reviving the Kamas language.
The Kamasins had never been a large group, and they lived a nomadic life, living next to Turkic and Yeniseian tribes. In the middle of the 17th century, Sayan Samoyeds started to assimilate into Turkic peoples and Kamas was the only one to survive until investigators came, such as Castrén and Kai Donner. Due to many hardships in Russia, Kai Donner was virtually certain that he would be the last one to investigate the Kamas language before it went extinct. Already in the middle of the 20th century it was thought Kamas had died. However it was later found there was still one speaker of Kamas left: Klavdiya Plotnikova. The Kamas speakers also assimilated into the Russians, as well as being turkicized. In the 20th century half of the Kamas people were born to Russian mothers, due to a higher death-rate of girls, which caused much influence to come from the Russian language. After the Russian Civil War, usage of the Kamas language started to fall drastically.
Kamas had two dialects: Kamas (also known as Kamass) and Koibal. However, the Koibal dialect is not well documented and only about 600 words of it are known, without any text or grammar. The Kamass dialect also had two sub-dialects, "Fat" () and "Eagle" (), which mainly differed in phonology. The Eagle dialect was the most dominant Kamas dialect.
The phonological account of Kamas is very basic, due to unclear data labeling by K. Donner and Castren. It is uncertain whether Kamas had primary vowel length, consonant gemination, and palatal stops or affricates as different phonemes. It varied widely between speakers. However, there are audio recordings of the last native speaker.
Kamas has both palatalized and palatal phonemes.
K. Donner also mentioned a sound and a f sound that was used in loanwords. Kamas also had aspiration.
The maximal syllable structure is CVCC. The only type of cluster allowed in the coda is ÃÂC. An example of this would be (duck). Palatalization only occurs in front of vowels. Three consonants do not occur word initially: the trill r, the velar nasal, and the glottal stop.
The last Kamas speakers had some variations in their speech and a few vowels and consonants were slightly different depending on the speaker, for example:
oo ~ ee
à~ ï
x ~ kÃÂô
b ~ ò (w)
Kamas is an agglutinative language and it has many flective markers.
Kamas has 7 cases:
The plural ending is . However, there are a few irregularities : 'child', 'children', 'moose' and genitive .
There are three tenses and moods in Kamas: conditional, imperative, future, present tense, past tense and optative.
The conditional is formed by after vowels and after consonants. The second component is which comes after the personal ending.
'I would go'.
In Kamas a verb is made negative by adding the word with the main verb. Examples with the word 'come':
Factitive verbs have the ending : 'child': = make children.
Deverbal nouns have the ending : 'eat': 'food'.
Instrumental nouns have the ending or : = close, = lid.
Kamas is a nominative type language, and the common structure of a Kamas sentence includes the subject, the object, the adverbial modifier, and a predicate. The subject is in the nominative case. The indefinite object is often expressed by using the nominative but the definite object with the accusative case. The adverbial modifier can also be expressed with adverbs or nouns in the form of local or instrumental cases. The predicate in Kamas can be preceded by gerundial verb forms, which indicates the manner or tense of an action that is expressed by the predicate. Composite sentences are not used in the Kamas language. Instead of sentences which are complex Kamas uses simple sentences with gerundial verbal constructions in which case it has no need to use conjunctions or a sequence of several simple sentences. In Kamas the subject and predicate must both agree in the person and in number.
Words which typically are used in attributive positions: (demonstrative pronouns, pronominal adjectives, and numerals) can also function as argument expressions. There are also no prepositions in Kamas, instead postpositions are used and the head of a postposition, usually is marked with a genitive (). However, there are also primary postpositions which can govern the lative case. The word order in Kamas is SOV (subject-object-verb), but the word order VO occurs when using an imperative. Clauses which introduce a situation, the locative adverbial often precedes the subject. In clauses which a new subject appears in a place which is given there is a reverse order. In Kamas the third person, zero copula predication varies with the usage of the verb 'be'. Kamas direct objects are subject to differential object agreement and to differential object marking. Subordinating conjunctions in Kamas are 'when' and 'while', which is a borrowing from Russian .
(examples in the UPA script)
Basic phrases in Kamas: