Nom: Two categories are distinguished from a morphosyntactic perspective: 1. [Sa, Snona, Aa and Anona]; 2. [P]. This type is known as nominative or nominative–accusative.
(s)he town-lat go-pst.3sg
‘He/she is going to the town.’ (S. D.)
(s)he old woman
‘She is an old lady.’ (S. D.)
(s)he shirt sew-prs.3sg
‘He/she sewed the shirt.’ (T. M.)
(s)he Natasa love-obj.sg.prs.3sg
‘He/she loves Natasa.’ (S. D.)
(s)he that.acc sew-prs.3sg
‘He/she sewed that.’ (T. M.)
(s)he that.acc szeret-obj.sg.prs.3sg
‘He/she loves that.’ (S. D.)
Northern Mansi is a nominative language (Keresztes 1998, Riese 2001), however nouns do not differentiate overtly between nominative and accusative forms (cf. (1)–(4)) because nouns do not have distinct accusative forms. Since the word order is flexible in Northern Mansi, the word order does not determine the role of nominals but the object tends to appear between the subject and the verb (3). If nominal and pronominal forms are compared (3–5; 4–6), it can be seen that the language really differentiates between these functions.