Its remaining speakers live on the right bank of the river Yenissey,
near its estuary, in the North of the Krasnoyarskij Kraj. Two dialects may be discerned,
Forest (or Bai) and Tundra (or Maddu) Enets, the former one still claiming the greater
number of speakers, though little is known about the present distribution of this
dialectal differentiation.
Enets is one of the most endangered languages of the whole Russian
North, the overall number of speakers being below 100. According to the survey by
Krivonogov (1998) only two settlements have a sizable number of ethnic Enets, viz.
Potapovo and Voroncovo, both on the shore of the Yenissej. Scattered Enets individuals,
among them reportedly also speakers of the language, live in Dudinka, the capital of the
Dolgano-Nenets NK, and on Taimyr peninsula. 57 Enets have been counted in 1998 in
Voroncovo (13, 9 % of the overall population), and 96 in Potapovo (18, 4 %). The language
retention rate, however, is slightly higher in Voroncovo (appx. 56 % = ca. 30 individuals;
against 36, 5 % = ca. 35 individuals). Almost all fluent speakers are above 40, and most
of them are above 60. The figures given for semi-speakers are even more precarious,
indicating a rather abrupt punctuation between the generations, which leaves the oldest
generation as full speakers and younger age cohorts with next to no knowledge of the
language at all.
Enets has probably for a long time been receding, available data show a
remarkable degree of foreign influences, which go as far as the borrowing of basic
personal pronouns from one of its southern neighbors, Ket.
In spite of the language's imminent death, it has been surprisingly
little studied. Though some lexical collections exist, no full grammar has been produced
to date (the grammatical sketch by Künnap 1999 is based on scattered data found in the
general Samoyedological literature), nor do we possess a sizable corpus of text materials.
It was again the Tomsk school of Siberian linguistics, which has
produced some studies of Enets, but any kind of monographical treatment of Enets as a
whole is still scarse.
