The Languages of Siberia

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1 (2009): 424–440, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00110.x

The Languages of Siberia

Edward J. Vajda*Western Washington University

AbstractAlthough Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner ofNorth Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to overthree dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties. Except forTuvan, Buryat, and Yakut, most are rapidly losing ground to Russian if notalready critically endangered. Several more have already become extinct in thefour centuries since the area’s incorporation into the Russian state. From anethnographic perspective, Siberian languages merit attention for their interplay ofpastoral and hunter–gatherer influences and also for the fact that Siberia repre-sents the staging ground for prehistoric migrations into the Americas. North Asiacontains several autochthonous microfamilies and isolates not found outside thisregion – the so-called ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ (or ‘Paleosiberian’) languages Ket, Yukaghir,Nivkh, and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan microfamily, which includes Chukchi,Koryak, and Itelmen. Ainu, formerly spoken on Sakhalin and the Kuriles as wellas in Hokkaido, and the three varieties of Eskimoan spoken in historic timeson the Russian side of Bering Strait, likewise belong to the earlier, non-foodproducing layers of ethnolinguistic diversity in North Asia. All of these languages,aside from Eskimoan, are entirely autochthonous to the northern half of Asia.Siberian languages spoken by pastoral groups, on the other hand, belong tofamilies represented more prominently elsewhere. Families, such as Uralic, Turkic,Mongolic, and especially Tungusic (the northern branch of the Tungus-Manchufamily), became dominant in Siberia long before the coming of the Russians. Asan extension of pastoral Inner Eurasia, Siberia displays many traits characteristicof a linguistic area: suffixal agglutination, widespread dependent marking typology,a fairly elaborate system of spatial case markers, and the use of case suffixes orpostpositions to signal syntactic subordination. There are also notable idiosyn-cratic features, particularly among the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages. Theseinclude the areally atypical feature of possessive prefixes and verb-internal subject/object prefixes in Ket, the unique verb-internal focus markers of Yukaghir, theextensive numeral allomorphs that serve as nominal classifiers in Nivkh, and thereduplicative stem augmentation used by Chukchi nouns to express the absolutivesingular (in contrast to plurals and oblique case forms, where the stem is simple).While North Asia has long been the preserve of linguists writing in Russian orGerman (including many Finns and Hungarians), since the collapse of the SovietUnion the number of English-language treatments of Siberian languages isincreasing.

© 2008 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass 3/1 (2009): 424–440, 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00110.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The Languages of Siberia 425

Linguistic Ecology of Siberia and North Asia’s Pacific Rim

The 5.1 million square miles of Asia lying north of the present-dayborders of China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan forms 77% of the territoryof the Russian Federation. This vast area is commonly known as Siberia,although Russians normally use the word Sibir’ (Siberia) to refer only tothe part of North Asia that is landlocked or facing the Arctic. The Russianconcept of ‘Siberia’ excludes the peninsulas and islands that form theNorth Pacific Rim. From west to east, Siberia begins at the eastern sideof the Ural Mountains conventionally held to divide Europe from Asia.Its western half is taken up by the Ob-Irtysh basin and the West SiberianPlain – the world’s most extensive wetland. The central portion of NorthAsia could be said to begin with the Yenisei River, which separates thelow-lying Ob-Irtysh watershed from the hilly uplands of the CentralSiberian Plateau, which in geological terms represents an originally separatecontinent. The Yenisei’s three largest tributaries – the Upper Tunguska,Mountain Tunguska, and the Angara – all flow into it from these easternhighlands. The core of the area sometimes referred to as ‘central Siberia’is thus the Yenisei River boundary between two geologically and ecolog-ically different worlds: the West Siberian Plain and the Central SiberianPlateau. Moving eastward across North Asia, the Central Siberian Plateaugives way to the expansive watershed of the Lena River, then to the low-lyingYablonovy, Stanovoi, and Verkhoyansk mountain ranges that run in asprawling, irregular diagonal across southeastern to northeastern Siberia.Eastward still, beyond Siberia proper, lies North Asia’s continuation of thePacific Rim, which contains the Chukotka Peninsula, Kamchatka, Russia’sMaritime Province where Vladivostok is located, Sakhalin Island and theKurile Island chain. Southern Sakhalin and the Kuriles were under Japaneserule before 1945. Viewed from south to north, North Asia begins withthe Inner Eurasian short-grass prairie (steppe), which quickly gives wayto a thick growth of conifers, birch, and aspen called the taiga – a borealforest more extensive than the Amazonian rain forest. In the Arctic, thetaiga gives way to tundra wherever permafrost lies too near the soil’ssurface to permit tree growth. As one travels from west to east, the tundrareaches increasingly southward in proportion to the weakening of the GulfStream that brings relatively more warmth and moisture to western Siberia.The only high mountains are the rugged Altai-Sayan of south-centralSiberia and the majestic volcanic peaks of southern Kamchatka and theKuriles. These volcanoes form part of the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fireand are geologically unrelated to the rest of North Asia. A good generalintroduction to North Asian physical and biological geography, withmaps, can be found online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia.

North Asia (i.e., the whole area approximating the westerner’s genericconception of ‘Siberia’) represents a worthwhile linguistic subdivision ofthe world’s language picture for several reasons. Although dominated by

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia

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pastoral lifestyles – reindeer breeding across most of the taiga and tundra,horse and cattle breeding among the Turkic and Mongol societies of thesouthern forest-steppe fringe and the Yakut in the Lena River basin –Siberia has been peripheral to the steppe-dominated history of InnerEurasia. Therefore, its people share many historical commonalities as arepository of influences from the pastoral nomads of the steppes. Anothermajor factor uniting these peoples is their political, cultural, and linguisticdomination by the Russian Empire and subsequently the Soviet Unionand Russian Federation during the past four centuries. Every one of thethree dozen or so surviving languages and major dialects indigenous toNorth Asia before the Russians’ arrival in 1582 is now a minority language,if not extinct, throughout their former territories, with the notableexception of Tuvan on the Mongolian border. Finally, this area was theprobable staging ground for prehistoric migrations into Alaska. Thetraditionally non-pastoral peoples that survive in North Asia – the Ket,Nivkh, Itelmen, and even the Ainu, who today no longer belong toNorth Asia geopolitically – cannot be properly understood withoutestimation of the historic interplay between the pastoral influence fromInner Asia during the past two millennia and the autochthonous NorthAsian hunter–gatherer lifestyles, some of which preserve cultural if notlinguistic affinities that appear closer to Native North America than to therest of Asia.

Modern Language Families and Demographics

The present article examines the linguistic picture across the whole ofRussian Asia, including both Siberia proper and North Asia’s Pacific Rim,with a focus on languages spoken by indigenous groups prior to the CossackYermak’s disruption of the Khanate of Sibir in 1582, the event that signaledthe beginning of intensive contact with Russian. Most languages native toNorth Asia have geopolitically more prominent genetic cousins outsidethis region. This is especially true of Uralic, Turkic, and Mongolic, butcould also be said of Tungusic, as well, in light of the Tungus-Manchulanguages traditionally spoken in north China. The Ob-Ugrian andSamoyedic languages of western Siberia belong to the larger Uralic family,and although the location of the original Uralic homeland is still debated(one possibility being southwestern Siberia), the family’s sociolinguisticallymost prominent members – Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian – are foundEurope. Turkic and Mongolic are families that probably originated in thesteppes of Central Asia or somewhere along the forest-steppe fringe ofsouthern Siberia; most speakers of these languages today are found inInner Asia rather than Siberia. Even the Tungusic languages and dialectsthat dominated eastern Siberia before the coming of the Russians andexpansion of the Turkic Yakut are historically connected with the peoplesof Manchuria and the Amur River (cf. Janhunen 1996 for a historical



survey of the languages and peoples of greater Manchuria). Except for Ketin central Siberia, the so-called Paleo-Asiatic or Paleo-Siberian languagesare primarily languages of the North Pacific Rim rather than Siberia. Thisgroup comprises Yukaghir, Chukchi-Koryak-Itelmen, Nivkh, and a fewforms of Eskimoan – an assortment of genetically unrelated microfamiliesand isolates that occupy various corners of extreme Northeastern Asia.The three documented varieties of ‘Siberian’ Yupik represent either anAsian remnant (probable in the case of Sirenik) or a back colonization(Naukan, Chaplino) of the Eskimo-Aleut family extending across theNorth American Arctic. Only the totally unrelated Yeniseic (or Yeniseian)microfamily, which contains modern-day Ket and several documentedextinct relatives, appears truly autochthonous to Siberia proper.

Beginning during the early Soviet era, the native peoples of North Asiahave been conventionally grouped into 26 numerically small ethnicgroups, with populations generally below 35,000. There are three muchlarger groups – Yakut, Buryat, and Tuvan – numbering into the hundredsof thousands. However, this total does not include native groups thatdisappeared since the 18th century. Several Yeniseic and Samoyedic languagesspoken in the Upper Yeniseic region north of the Altai-Sayan Mountainsdied out during the 18th and 19th centuries. The ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ areas ofnortheastern-most Asia similarly have lost a number of distinct varietiesof what is usually described as dialects of Yukaghir, Koryak, and Itelmen,to say nothing of the evacuation of Ainu into northern Japan from SouthSakhalin and the Kuriles in 1945. Nor does the official roster of northernpeoples reveal that some ethnic groups designated as single nations underSoviet rule speak mutually unintelligible forms of speech rather than meredialects of the same language, as conventionally interpreted. This especiallyconcerns forms of Ob-Ugrian (Khanty, Mansi), the Samoyedic languageSelkup, as well as Ewenki, Ewen, Khakas, and Altai Turkic (note that thefirst two are often spelled ‘Evenki’ and ‘Even’ following the Russiantransliteration even though the first consonant is not a true labiodental).The true linguistic map of North Asia today is therefore more diversethan the official ethnic divisions might suggest. It was still more diverseduring the first centuries of Tsarist rule over these areas. The linguisticmap of Siberia was probably far more diverse in prehistory, before thespread of pastoral groups across most of this area. During the past fewmillennia, the reindeer-herding ancestors of modern Ugric, Samoyedic,and Tungusic speakers repopulated nearly all of North Asia, with theexception of the Yeniseic-speaking areas of the upper and middle reachesof the Yenisei River and the sea-mammal hunting communities of extremenortheastern Siberia and the North Pacific Rim. The so-called ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ groups inhabiting these areas in historic times are probably theremnants of a once highly diverse linguistic and ethnic mosaic in theprehistoric Asian taiga and tundra, perhaps rivaling that found in NorthAmerica upon the arrival of Europeans to that continent. Recent

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sociolinguistic statistics on North Asian language can be found in Kibrik(1991), Krauss (1997), Neroznak (1994), and Salminen (1997a). Onlineresources include http://lingsib.iea.ras.ru/en and http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/rf.html.

Syncrhonic Treatments of North Asian Languages

It is hardly possible here even to begin to do justice toward acknowledging allof the numerous accomplishments of the Russian-speaking and German-speaking linguists and ethnographers (many of them of Finnish orHungarian nationality) who have studied and written about North Asiaduring the past two centuries. By way of partial apology, I would urge anyoneinterested in Siberia to learn Russian and German to become acquaintedfirsthand with much of the seminal, foundation literature on this region ofthe world. The best general English-language introduction and referencecovering all the language of North Asia remains the appropriate sections ofBernard Comrie’s (1981) Languages of the Soviet Union, which goes far towardsatisfying both linguist and layman alike. Two recent publications in Englishthat offer useful historiographic compilations of at least part of the vastextant literature on Siberian linguistics are Anderson (2004b) for centralSiberia, and Vajda (2001) for the Yeniseic peoples and languages. Thepresent historiography will limit itself to select highlights from the past aswell as the most accessible or most recent English-language publications.

While no substantial documentation of North Asian languages wasundertaken before the 18th and 19th centuries, the recording of southeasternSiberian languages technically began with the proper names mentioned inancient Chinese writings such as the Xiong Nu words found in early Handocuments (Vovin 2000). Western Siberian languages were first recordedin the seventeenth century in the form of toponyms and word lists takendown by explorers and travelers. The scientific expeditions sent out by Peterthe Great or his successors collected a modest number of basic vocabularyitems from many languages and dialects of Siberia. Notable among theseearliest European publications is the two-volume compendium of vocab-ulary edited by Peter Simon Pallas (1787–1789), which represented mostof the languages of North Asia, including several now extinct ones.

One of the earliest scholars to undertake substantial grammatical and lexicaldocumentation of Siberian languages was the brilliant and indefatigableFinnish linguist Matthias Castrén (1813–1853). His pioneering grammarsof Ugrian, Samoyedic, and Yeniseic languages have not lost their scientificrelevance even today. In particular, Castrén’s grammar of ‘Yenisei-Ostyak’,published posthumously by Franz Anton Schiefner (Castrén 1858),remains of inestimable value, as it contains the only grammatical sketch ofthe now extinct Kott language, based on Castrén’s intensive work withthe last five Kott speakers in the 1840s. During the early 20th century(Figure 1), Castrén’s work on Samoyedic and Ket was continued by his

http://lingsib.iea.ras.ru/en

http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/rf.html



countryman, Kai Donner (cf. Alatalo, Donner, and Sirelius 2004 for anew Selkup dictionary that includes Donner’s Selkup dictionary materials).As for early corpora of Ket vocabulary, both Castrén and Donner’s lexicalmaterials have been incorporated into Werner’s (2003) comprehensiveYeniseic comparative dictionary. The Hungarian Antal Reguly made asimilarly groundbreaking study of Khanty (Ostyak) language and folkloreduring the 1840s. His field notes were verified, supplemented, and sub-sequently published by the prominent Uralist József Pápay (1910). Theworks of the brilliant Finnish linguist Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen, whoworked on Khanty dialects at the turn of the 20th century, have likewisenot lost their significance even today (cf. Karjalainen 1964, 1970).

During the Soviet era, a vast amount of serious work was undertakento document all of the languages of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.Important grammatical descriptions and dictionaries reflecting nearlyevery surviving North Asian language and dialect appeared in the periodbeginning in 1925. In that year, the so-called Committee of the Northwas founded (Slezkine 1994), which led to an unprecedented burst ofscientific attention toward the languages and cultures of northern peoples.

Fig. 1. Peoples and languages of Siberia in the twentieth century.Source: Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology.

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This activity never fully abated, despite the disbanding of the committeein the 1930s and the political suppression of most of its members. Afterthis period, seminal linguistic work was carried out both by scholars whohad been politically exiled to remote areas of Asia, as well as by those whocontinued to work from scholarly centers such as Moscow and Leningrad.One of the most remarkable scholars from the original membership of theCommittee of the North was Erukhim A. Kreinovich (1906–1985),whose linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork on Nivkh, Yukaghir, and Ketremains fundamentally important; cf. the short biographical sketches inBlack (1987) and Vajda (2001: 7, 169–74). Although Kreinovich enduredyears of political repression, his work on these difficult and inaccessibleSiberian isolates could be ranked alongside the celebrated fieldworkconducted by American linguist Edward Sapir on a host of similarlydiverse North American families. Another exiled scholar, Andreas Dul’zon(1900–1973), founded an entire school of Siberian studies in Tomsk (cf.Vajda 2001: 6–7, 95–112; Vajda 2003: vii–viii). It was Dul’zon who wrotethe first modern full-length grammar of Ket (Dul’zon 1968) and alsoworked out the distribution of substrate Ket-related river names acrossmuch of western and central Siberia (cf. map in Vajda 2001: xxvii). Byanalyzing Tsarist fur-tax collection records archived in Leningrad, theethnographer Boris O. Dolgikh (1960) worked out the precise distributionof North Asian tribes in the early seventeenth century, thereby helpingtrace the historical processes leading to the contemporary distribution ofthese peoples (cf. map in Vajda 2001: xxvi).

The Soviet and post-Soviet documentation of North Asian languagesby Russian-speaking scholars includes a wealth of dictionaries, monograph-length grammars, and volumes of articles devoted to nearly every linguisticfacet of these languages. Noteworthy as general reference works are severalmulti-volume treatments of the languages of Asiatic Russia, reflecting thecollaboration of numerous leading specialists on the individual languages.These include the five-volume Languages of the peoples of the USSR,published between 1966 and 1968 under different editors, and the three-volume Languages of Asia and Africa (for a listing of each volume, cf. Comrie1981: 294). During the past 15 years, similar references have appeared inthe multi-volume series Languages of the World, under the general editorshipof V. N. Yartseva (1993–97). Excellent descriptions of North Asian languagescan be found in the individual volumes devoted to Uralic (1993), Paleosi-berian (1997), Turkic (1997), and Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu (1997).High-quality dictionaries and grammars reflecting the state-of-the-artknowledge of individual Siberian and Far Eastern languages have continuedto appear in Russia during the post-Soviet period. The best general treatmentof North Asian languages available to English readers remains Comrie (1981),which makes superb use of the wealth of earlier Soviet-era descriptions.

Recently, thanks in large part to new opportunities for Westerners toconduct fieldwork with indigenous languages of Siberia and the Russian



Far East, alongside the increased ability of Russian scholars to publish inthe West, many grammars and dictionaries of North Asian languages havebegun appearing in English or German. The series Routledge (now Curzon)language family descriptions offers excellent general surveys of Turkic (Johanson& Csató 1998), Uralic (Abondolo 1998), and Mongolic (Janhunen 2003)containing individual descriptions of each Siberian member of these respectivefamilies. Works on the synchronic grammar of individual languages includeKämpfe & Volodin (1995) on Chukchi; Nedjalkov (1997) and Bulatova &Grenoble (1999) on Ewenki; Künnap (1999a) on Enets; Erdal & Nevskaja(2006) on the eastern Turkic languages, including Shor; Salminen (1997b)on Nenets; Georg & Volodin (1999) on Itelmen; Anderson (1998) onKhakas; Anderson & Harrison (1999) on Tuvan; Nikolaeva & Tolskaja (2001)on Udihe; Riese (2001) on Northern Mansi; Nikolaeva (2003) on theNorthern Khanty Obdorsk dialect; Maslova (2003a,b) on Yukaghir;and Werner (1997c), Vajda (2004), and Georg (2007) on Ket.

A number of recent publications in Western languages come from émigrélinguists, such as the Uralicist Eugen Helimski (formerly of Moscow). Suchscholars have done much to further the linguistic study of Siberia outsidethe borders of the former Soviet Union (for example, cf. Helimski 1997,for an excellent description of the extinct Southern Samoyedic languageMator). The Siberianist Elena Skribnik, originally part of the superb teamof linguists at Novosibirsk State University, has worked at the Universityof Munich during the past decade (cf. Skribnik 2004 for a good generaloverview of Siberian languages published in German). The highlyproductive Ketologist Heinrich Werner (G. K. Verner), who began hiscareer as a student of Andreas Dulson in Tomsk, another classic center ofSiberian studies, has lived since 1991 in Bonn, Germany. During this period,he has produced over a dozen new monographs on Yeniseic linguistics (cf.the biographic sketch in Vajda 2003: 3–7). Werner’s three-volume Yeniseicdictionary (Werner 2002) set a new standard for the lexicographicdescription of these languages. His recent monographs also includeimportant new descriptions of extinct languages: Kott (Werner 1997a),Yugh (Werner 1997b), as well as the enormously useful compilation and analysisof all 18th century documentation of Yeniseic languages (Werner 2005).Other publications on now-extinct languages includes Ago Künnap’sgrammatical sketch of Kamass (Künnap 1999b), based on work with thatlanguage’s last native speaker. The American team of Gregory Andersonand David Harrison, who have conducted extensive fieldwork among thevarious Turkic languages and dialects of south Siberia, are currentlypreparing monograph-length grammars of Chulym Turkic and Tofa(Tofalar). Their work builds on important earlier work by Andreas Dulsonand V. I. Rassadin, respectively. Linguist and population geneticist BrigittePakendorf of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,Leipzig, has produced important research on Yakut (cf. Pakendorf 2007).American linguist Jonathan Bobaljik is studying Itelmen (cf. Bobaljik

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2005, 2006). Stefan Georg, the first Westerner to undertake modernlinguistic fieldwork with the Ket in their Yenisei homeland, is currentlypreparing a companion volume to his monograph Ket phonology andmorphology (Georg 2007), which will describe the syntax and includemany hitherto unpublished texts. Edward Vajda is also gathering materialsfor a comprehensive grammar of Ket, to be published in the MoutonGrammar Library. Broader collaboration between Russian and Westernlinguists is proving crucial to the success of such endeavors.

Typology and Areal Linguistics

Siberia shows a number of characteristics typical of a language area (cf.Anderson 2003, 2004b). Fortescue (1998: 60–78) enumerates over 50traits present over significant portions of this region or which are sharedbetween two or more families, suggesting successive waves of arealinfluence left by different historical migrations, the latest of which, beforethe arrival of Russians in the past four centuries, involved the northwardmovement of pastoral groups. At the same time, the genetically diverselanguages spoken across North Asia contain numerous typologicallyidiosyncratic traits, as well. This is particularly true of the geneticallydiverse isolates and microfamilies subsumed under the ‘Paleosiberian’designation. The present section will survey the phonologies, morphologies,and syntax of North Asian languages from both vantage points.

The most salient complex of typological features uniting most languagesof this area, as well as those of Inner Asia, is the widespread prevalenceof SOV word order, dependent marking, postpositions, and suffixal agglu-tination. Some of these shared commonalities are undoubtedly due togenetic inheritance, although language contact has also played a pervasiverole among Inner Eurasia’s pastoral peoples, a fact that arguably qualifiesmuch of North Asia as a linguistic area in the true sense of the word.Anderson (2003, 2004b) notes the prevalence of fairly elaborate case-marking systems with largely locative functions. Case systems becometypically more elaborate as one moves from western to eastern Siberia.North Asian languages typically have relatively simple vowel systems,sometimes augmented by phonemic length distinctions. Vowel harmonyis prevalent in Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages – families thatare extremely widespread across the area under consideration, and seemsto have spread to adjacent languages as well (cf. Filchenko 2007 for adiscussion of vowel harmony phenomena in eastern Khanty). Ergativemorphosyntax is found in Chukchi as well as in Eskimoan, and ergativetraits have also been identified among the largely nominative–accusativeUralic languages of western Siberia (Comrie 1978; Kulonen 1989),although the origin of these features is unclear.

Unusual, or at least areally isolated typological traits include the systemof grammaticalized focus marking in Yukaghir (Comrie 1981: 259;



Maslova 2003a), the use of reduplication in the Chukotko-Kamchatkannoun to mark absolutive forms, and the presence of multiple forms ofnumber words in Nivkh signaling the semantic classification of the itembeing counted. The most basic numerals in Nivkh show over two dozenforms; some are used generically for counting human nouns, others foritems as specific as fishing nets (Gruzdeva 1998). Number classificationsystems using particles placed between the number and noun are prevalentin East Asia, but nothing remotely similar to the unique Nivkh numeralallomorphs exists anywhere in North Asia. Among North Asia’s isolates,Ket perhaps has the largest number of unusual features. These include asystem of phonemic tones that involve melody, vowel length and laryn-gealization (Werner 1997c; Vajda 2004; Georg 2007). Ket also possesses apolypersonal verb containing up to eight prefixal morpheme classes.Subject/object agreement is lexically conditioned, with two productivetransitive agreement marker configurations and five productive intransitiveconfigurations, along with several more found in only a handful of verbs(Vajda 2004). This unique system of verb-internal actant marking – whichVajda (in press 2) argues developed when an originally prefixing verbmorphology restructured itself to become suffixing – has no true analoganywhere in the world. Noun incorporation is also present in Ket,although restricted to a handful of verb roots. Elsewhere in North Asia,Chukchi possesses a highly productive system of incorporation that allowsentire noun phrases to be included inside the verb form (Kämpfe &Volodin 1995). In the realm of phonology, in addition to the Ket tones,the most unusual features are the extremely high ratio of consonants tovowels in Itelmen (Georg & Volodin 1999) and patterns of root-initialconsonant mutations that occur in Nivkh compound word formation(Gruzdeva 1998; Mattissen 2003).

Earlier contributions of an understanding of Siberian areal typologyinclude studies of individual grammatical and phonological traits prevalentacross Uralic by Itkonen (1955), Serebrennikov (1964), and Collinder(1965). Recent works that contribute material on the typology of NorthAsian languages include Anderson’s (2004a) monograph on auxiliary verbconstructions in Altai-Sayan Turkic, as well as Anderson (2006), whichcontains numerous examples of the use and development of auxiliary verbsin Siberian languages. There is also an edited volume of 14 studies oncomplex sentence formation in North Asian languages (Vajda in press 1).

Perspectives on the Linguistic Prehistory of North Asia

One general feature of Siberia’s linguistic prehistory appears fairly clear.When the Russians arrived in the late 16th or early 17th century, mostof North Asia contained languages brought northward from Inner Eurasiathrough migrations of reindeer breeding or stockbreeding peoples duringthe past three millennia. In western Siberia, these migrations led to the

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widespread distribution of Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup)and Ob-Ugrian (Khanty, Mansi) languages. In eastern Siberia, the northwardmovement of reindeer breeders resulted in an even wider distribution ofEwenki and Ewen dialects, with related Tungusic languages dominatingthe Amur River basin and adjacent areas of the Russian Far East (Nanai,Negidal, Ulcha, Oroch, and others). Mongolic speakers (the Buryat)occupied an area south of Lake Baikal. To the west, Turkic speakers cameto dominate south-central Siberia, giving rise to the modern Khakas,Altai, Shor, Tuvan, and Tofa languages. Some Turkic-speaking groupsmoved from this area into the Lena River watershed to become today’sYakut (Sakha) people. The erstwhile population in all regions populatedby reindeer breeders was presumably absorbed or driven off, leaving onlya few remnant populations that today do not fit into any of Eurasia’swidespread language families. These include the Ket and other, nowextinct, Yeniseic peoples in central Siberia, the Nivkh and Ainu in theFar East, and finally the Yukaghir and Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen peoplesin the extreme northeast of Asia. Along with the Asiatic Eskimo onRussia’s Bering Strait coast, all of these groups have been referred to as‘Paleosiberians’ or ‘Paleoasiatics’, a term that references their earlier presencein North Asia. In this connection, the reindeer breeders might appropriatelybe referred to as ‘Neo-Siberians’. With the exception of Chukchi andKoryak, the ‘Paleosiberians’ are foragers – hunters, gatherers or fisherswithout domesticated animals other than dogs used for transport. The factthat the Chukchi and Koryak are reindeer breeders suggests that eitherthey adopted this lifestyle from incoming Tungusic tribes or themselvesare more recent migrants from the south, in other words, also ‘Neo-Siberians’. Interestingly, the Itelmen of southern Kamchatka, whoselanguage falls into the same microfamily, are foragers, which suggests thatthe Chukchi and Koryak reindeer pastoralism represents a later adaptation.If this is true, then the use of the term ‘Paleo-Siberian’ for these groupsof reindeer breeders would be appropriate after all. Finally, in the densewest Siberian taiga, the difference in subsistence pattern between hunterand reindeer breeder did not always remain clearly delineated. Certainoriginally reindeer-breeding communities – namely, the Forest Nenets,eastern Khanty, and southern Selkup – adapted a hunting-based lifestylenot starkly differentiated from their ‘Paleo-Siberian’ Ket neighbors; cf.Jordan and Filchenko (2005) on the Khanty, and Jordan (2008) for a wide-ranging discussion of how various native Siberian peoples accommodatedtheir lifestyle to the local geography.

It is important to bear in mind that ‘Paleo-Siberian’ refers to an assort-ment of language isolates and microfamilies rather than to a languagefamily. It is also crucial to realize that much of the original linguisticdiversity of North Asia – diversity perhaps even approximating that foundin pre-contact North America – was largely erased on the Asian side bythe historically recent expansion of pastoral groups. Although the modern



languages of North Asia undoubtedly contain some substrate influencefrom the hunter–gatherer languages they replaced, this influence is verydifficult to trace with any certainty. Efforts to detect traces of languagemixing involving two or more documented languages (cf. Anderson 2004b;Vajda in press 1) have been more successful. In particular, south SiberianTurkic has been shown to include substrate influence from bygone Samoyedicand Yeniseic languages, and Yakut shows significant influence from Ewenki.This is particularly true of Dolgan, a Turkic language closely related to Yakutand spoken on the Taimyr Peninsula by a population known to have derivedfrom Ewenki groups who underwent Turkicization in the 17th century(Pakendorf 2007). An areal study of the whole of North Asia that mightventure to hypothesize on substrates left over from undocumented‘Paleosiberian’ languages has yet to be undertaken, although Fortescue’s(1998) pioneering areal study of Greater Beringia (the land on both sidesof Bering Strait) goes a long way in this direction. The toponymy of widestretches of North Asia likewise awaits its researcher. Such future studiesmight shed additional light on the spread of pastoralists and the formerlymuch wider distribution of hunter–gatherer languages.

Recent research into the linguistic prehistory of North Asia can bedivided into studies that seek to more fully elucidate the internal historyof generally accepted language families and those that propose new con-nections between individual families or isolates. Among studies of the firstcategory, important comparative or etymological dictionaries have beenpublished on a number of North Asian languages. These include HeinrichWerner’s three-volume comparative dictionary of Yeniseic (Werner 2003),Irina Nikolaeva’s (2006) comparative dictionary of Yukaghir dialects, andMichael Fortescue’s (2005) dictionary of Chukchi-Kamchatkan (a micro-family including Itelmen). Oleg Mudrak’s etymological dictionary ofChukchi-Kamchatkan (Mudrak 2000), published in Russian, should alsobe mentioned here, as well as a comparative Eskimo dictionary (Fortescueet al. 1994), for which a second edition is currently being prepared.Recent volumes of collected works devoted to Mongolic (Janhunen 2003),Uralic (Abondolo 1998), and Turkic ( Johanson and Csató 1998) containchapters on linguistic prehistory and the respective proto-languages. Anumber of important works by Claus Schönig have appeared on Turkicdiachronic linguistics, notably Schönig (2001) for south Siberian Turkic.Gyula Déscy has published monographs devoted to the reconstruction ofProto-Uralic (Déscy 1990) and Proto-Turkic (Déscy 1998). Gerhard Doerfer’s(2004) etymological dictionary of the Tungus-Manchu languages, withits focus on the languages of Manchuria, provides an excellent com-panion to Tsintsius’s (1975–1977) two-volume comparative dictionaryof the Tungusic languages. An etymological dictionary of Yeniseic iscurrently in preparation (Vajda and Werner in preparation). Finally,Sergei S. Starostin’s reconstructions of several Eurasian proto-languages areaccessible online at (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygtnnl)

http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygtnnl)

436 Edward Vajda


on a Web site that continues to be maintained and updated by his sonGeorge Starostin.

A number of recent studies center on questions of genetic relatednessinvolving North Asian languages. A few have challenged the existence ofgenerally accepted language families, notably Angela Marcantonio’s (2002)monograph asserting that there was no Uralic language family, a positionthat has not received support, as the evidence linking the various branchesof Uralic remains compelling. Another is A. P. Volodin’s view that Itelmenis not genetically related to Chukchi-Koryak, with the grammatical andlexical parallels shared between these languages interpreted rather as arisingfrom extensive language contact (cf. Georg and Volodin 1999). While theposition of Itelmen as belonging to Chukchi-Kamchatkan appears justified(cf. Fortescue 1998, 2005; Mudrak 2000), the strong divergence inphonology, lexicon, and grammatical structure exhibited by Itelmenvis-à-vis Chukchi and Koryak certainly deserves further attention, as itcould be due to some hitherto undetermined substrate (cf. Fortescue 1998).

One recent hypothesis on the deep genetic relations between NorthAsian languages is Joseph Greenberg’s two-volume work on Eurasiatic(Greenberg 2000–2002), a phylum that includes all languages of theregion except for Ket. While only a minority of historical linguists acceptsthis group, or the somewhat similar Nostratic Hypothesis, Greenberg’sexamination of tongue-root harmony features and pronouns, particularlythe widespread m/t distinction in first- and second-person pronouns acrossmuch of northern Eurasia, reveal important commonalities that are difficultto attribute to chance or diffusion (cf. Vajda 2003 for a review). The Altaichypothesis (i.e. the assertion that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungus-Manchuform a demonstrable genetic family) continues unabated to generateimportant new publications by its supporters, most notably a three-volumeetymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and a monograph supportingthe Altaic affiliations of Japanese and Korean (Robbeets 2005), as well asstrong refutations by its opponents (cf. reviews of these books by Georg2005, forthcoming; Vovin 2005). The issue of whether Yukaghir is anisolate or can be related to Uralic (Nikolaeva 2006) remains moot. Fortescue(1998) cites typological parallels to support a genetic link between Uralic,Eskimo-Aleut, Yukaghir, and perhaps Chukotko-Kamchatkan in a familycalled ‘Uralo-Siberian’. The idea that Eskimo and Aleut might be relatedto Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in theearly 19th century (Rask 1818). Recently, German linguist Uwe Seefloth(2000) has proposed morphological evidence linking these two families.As for Ket, Vajda (2008) has amassed new morphological and lexicalevidence supporting a link between Yeniseic and Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingitin North America, a proposal that could shed light on the linguisticaffiliations of Siberia’s most intriguing language isolate. This proposal,which echoes similar conclusions by Alfredo Trombetti (1923) and MerrittRuhlen (1998), would represent the first demonstrated connection



between exclusively Old World and New World language families (notethat the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family straddles Bering Strait). Allof these research proposals suggest that Siberian linguistics has much tocontribute to the understanding of human prehistory. Ongoing debateson language classification suggest that this vast yet often overlooked regionhas yet to divulge all of its discoverable secrets.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by Max Planck Institute for EvolutionaryAnthropology, Leipzig, Germany, which also provided Figure 1.

Short Biography

Edward J. Vajda is a professor of linguistics, Russian language, and EurasianStudies at Western Washington University, where he has taught for thepast 22 years. In 1992, he was awarded his university’s Excellence inTeaching Award. He is currently the Director of Western’s Center for EastAsian Studies. His areas of expertise include complex verb morphologiesand historical-comparative linguistics, with a special focus on the languagesof native Siberia. His current work is primarily devoted to Ket, an endan-gered isolate spoken by fewer than 200 people in villages near the YeniseiRiver. He is one of the four editors of the New York based linguisticsjournal Word.

Note

* Correspondence address: Edward J. Vajda, Western Washington University, Modern Languages,MS-9057, 516 High Street, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

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Documents

The Languages of Siberia