Forest Enets

Forest Enets (autonymously Бай тоны) is a Northern Samoyedic language of the Uralic family, on the verge of extinction with only around 30 fluent elderly speakers remaining. The Forest Enets community lives in the taiga forest zone of the lower Yenisei River in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, primarily in the settlements of Potapovo and Vorontsovo. Linguistically, Forest Enets is part of the Northern Samoyedic branch alongside Tundra Enets (enh) and the much larger Tundra Nenets (yrk), which together with Nganasan (nio) form the Northern Samoyedic group. The Enets people have suffered severe demographic and cultural pressure under Soviet collectivization (forced sedentarization in the 1930s-50s), then post-Soviet economic disruption, leading to almost complete language shift to Russian. Recent revitalization efforts via Krasnoyarsk Krai Indigenous Affairs Department face severe practical challenges due to the small remaining speech community.