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Southern or Tavda Mansi is an extinct Uralic language spoken in Russia in the Sverdlovsk. It was recorded from an area isolated from the other Mansi varieties along the river Tavda. Around 1900 a couple hundred speakers existed; in the 1960s it was spoken only by a few elderly speakers, and it has since then become extinct. It had strong Tatar lexical influence and displayed several archaisms such as vowel harmony, retention of /y/ (elsewhere merged with */æ/), /tsʲ/ (elsewhere deaffricated to /sʲ/), /æː/ (elsewhere fronted to /aː/ or diphthongized) and /ɑː/ (elsewhere raised to /oː/).
Russian researchers use the term "southern dialect" (Russian: южный диалект) when describing the Tavda language.
Ромбандеева, Е. И. (1976). "Мансийский язык". Основы финно-угорского языкознания. Марийский, пермский и угорские языки (in Russian). Москва: Наука. pp. 229–239.
Traditional distribution and current Mansi settlements
Southern Mansi is classified as Extinct by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010).png)
