Nanai belongs to the Southern (Amur, or Nanai) branch of the Manchu-Tungus languages. It is spoken by about 5,000 speakers in Siberia, specifically in the Khabarovsk and Primorye territories, and in the Poronay district of the Sakhalin region of the Russia Federation. A slightly different dialect, known as Hezhen (赫哲语), is spoken along the Amur River in the North Eastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang (黑龙江).
Nanai was first written in the 1930s with a version of the Latin alphabet. Since 1937 it has been written with the version of the Cyrillic alphabet shown below.
The letters in blue are only used in Russian names and loanwords
Information on pronunciation compiled by Wolfram Siegel
Source: The Gospel of Luke in Nanai language, Institute for Bible Translation, Moscow 2002
Information about the Nanai language
http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/Russia/bibl/Nanai.html
http://www.ethnologue.com/14/show_language.asp?code=GLD
Information about the Nanai people
http://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/nanais.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanai
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ea210/maritime.htm
http://www.narodru.ru/peoples1247.html (in Russian)
Tungusic / Manchu-Tungus languages
Emurhergen,
Even,
Evenki,
Jurchen,
Manchu,
Nanai