Even has 18 vowels. These vowels are shown in Table 1. The language

• Main Authors: Even Phonology, Onur Mutlu
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Evenki; Kamchatka Peninsula; Kamchatka; Yakutia; Siberia
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.357.7253; http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/onur_even_1999.pdf

In this paper I would like to give a concise description of Even grammar, which is the native language of a minor ethnic group in Russia known as Evens or Lamuts. Even is spoken in Yakutia and the Kamchatka Peninsula, which ar e in the northeastern part of Russia and Siberia. It is the mother tongue of 43.8 % of the Evens, whose total population was 17,055 in 1989 (Malchukov, p.3). Therefore Even had a total of 7470 mother-tongue speakers in 1989. The majority of Evens are bilin gual. They speak Russian and Even. They use Even especially in family life. Even is a written language. In the early 1930s Even’s writing system was based on the Latin alphabet, but in 1937 it was changed to the Cyrillic alphabet. In 1958, some special letters were added to the Even alphabet (Malchukov p.4). Even belongs to the Tungusic language family which is under the Altaic phylum of Ural-Altaic languages. Tungusic is divided into two subfamilies in itself: North and South Tungusic. Even is a North Tu ngusic language, whose closest relatives are Evenki and Negidal (Please see Figure 1 for a family tree). Being a Ural-Altaic language, Even displays many of the characteristics other languages of this phylum have such as agglutination, SOV word order, vowe l harmony, a complex case system, and postpositions. We’ll explore these in the later parts of the paper, but first start with the phonology of Even.