Khanty

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A Finno-Ugric indigenous people living in western Siberia along the Ob River basin ; the Uralic language spoken by that people
2. An indigenous ethnic group of western Siberia who traditionally fish and hunt in the Ob region ; the Uralic tongue that this group speaks
3. A small Siberian indigenous population inhabiting the Ob River region ; the Finno-Ugric language used by members of that community

Etymology: The Khanty are an Indigenous people of western Siberia, living along the Ob River and its tributaries, and their name is an ethnonym that the people themselves used long before outsiders wrote it down. In the Khanty languages, the word appears in several regional forms: "hănty" in Northern Khanty, "hăntjə" in Southern Khanty, and "kăntjəg jag" in Eastern Khanty, where "jag" means "people." Each form denotes both a Khanty person and, in some uses, a man or the Khanty collectively. The word is thought to descend from a Proto-Uralic root "kunta," meaning "clan," "kin," or "community." That makes the name fundamentally a social term: to be Khanty was to belong to a kinship group rather than to be defined by a territory or a state. The same ancestral root also underlies the name of the closely related Mansi people, showing how deep these shared roots run in the region's languages.