The Emergence of Hierarchical Alignment in Northern Khanty

This study investigates the morphosyntactic coding of core arguments in Northern Khanty, with a focus on the use of active/passive voice and subjective/objective conjugation. The goal is to offer a more detailed understanding of the coding patterns across dialects. To achieve this, I analyze corpus data from four Northern Khanty dialects: Obdorsk, Shuryshkary, Tegi, and Kazym Khanty, using a dataset of 4,320 transitive clauses from available corpora. These clauses are manually annotated based on parameters of person, animacy, referential status, and topicality. The analysis reveals that Northern Khanty exhibits varying degrees of hierarchical alignment across its dialects, forming a gradient from north to south. Based on this observation, I argue that Northern Khanty historically transitioned from nominative/accusative alignment to symmetrical alignment, remnants of which can be observed in the Obdorsk dialect and in Eastern Khanty. It further evolved into hierarchical alignment, as seen in the present-day Kazym dialect

Linguistics · History · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy

• Semantic and Stylistic Features of Figurative Lexis in the Khanty Language (Based on Colloquial and Artistic Discourse)

  Open Access•Andrey D Kaksin•Finno-Ugric World•2025

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