Nanai language

The Nanai language (also called Gold or Hezhen) is spoken by the Nanai people in Siberia, and to a much smaller extent in China's Heilongjiang province, where it is known as Hezhe. The language has about 1,400 speakers out of 17,000 ethnic Nanai, but most (especially younger generations) are also fluent in Russian or Chinese, and mostly use one of those languages for communication.

Nomenclature

In China, the language is referred to as hè zhé yǔ (Chinese: 赫哲语). The Nanai people there variously refer to themselves as /na nio/, /na bəi/, /na nai/ (which all mean "local people"), /ki lən/, and /χə ɖʐən/, the last being the source of the Chinese ethnonym Hezhe.

Distribution

The language is distributed across several distantly-located areas: