Languages Siberia

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The Languages of Siberia
Article in Language and Linguistics Compass · January 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00110.x · Source: DBLP
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Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00110.x
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The Languages of Siberia
6
7 Edward J. Vajda*
Western Washington University
8
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10
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12 Abstract
13 Although Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner of
14 North Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to over
15 three dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties. Except for
16 Tuvan, Buryat, and Yakut, most are rapidly losing ground to Russian if not
17 already critically endangered. Several more have already become extinct in the
four centuries since the area’s incorporation into the Russian state. From an
18 ethnographic perspective, Siberian languages merit attention for their interplay of
19 pastoral and hunter–gatherer influences and also for the fact that Siberia repre-
20 sents the staging ground for prehistoric migrations into the Americas. North Asia
21 contains several autochthonous microfamilies and isolates not found outside this
22 region – the so-called ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ (or ‘Paleosiberian’) languages Ket, Yukaghir,
23 Nivkh, and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan microfamily, which includes Chukchi,
24 Koryak, and Itelmen. Ainu, formerly spoken on Sakhalin and the Kuriles as well
25 as in Hokkaido, and the three varieties of Eskimoan spoken in historic times
26 on the Russian side of Bering Strait, likewise belong to the earlier, non-food
27 producing layers of ethnolinguistic diversity in North Asia. All of these languages,
28 aside from Eskimoan, are entirely autochthonous to the northern half of Asia.
Siberian languages spoken by pastoral groups, on the other hand, belong to
29 families represented more prominently elsewhere. Families, such as Uralic, Turkic,
30 Mongolic, and especially Tungusic (the northern branch of the Tungus-Manchu
31 family), became dominant in Siberia long before the coming of the Russians. As
32 an extension of pastoral Inner Eurasia, Siberia displays many traits characteristic
33 of a linguistic area: suffixal agglutination, widespread dependent marking typology,
34 a fairly elaborate system of spatial case markers, and the use of case suffixes or
35 postpositions to signal syntactic subordination. There are also notable idiosyn-
36 cratic features, particularly among the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages. These
37 include the areally atypical feature of possessive prefixes and verb-internal subject/
38 object prefixes in Ket, the unique verb-internal focus markers of Yukaghir, the
39 extensive numeral allomorphs that serve as nominal classifiers in Nivkh, and the
reduplicative stem augmentation used by Chukchi nouns to express the absolutive
40 singular (in contrast to plurals and oblique case forms, where the stem is simple).
41 While North Asia has long been the preserve of linguists writing in Russian or
42 German (including many Finns and Hungarians), since the collapse of the Soviet
43 Union the number of English-language treatments of Siberian languages is
44 increasing.
45
© 2008 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Edward Vajda
1
Linguistic Ecology of Siberia and North Asia’s Pacific Rim
2
3 The 5.1 million square miles of Asia lying north of the present-day
4 borders of China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan forms 77% of the territory
5 of the Russian Federation. This vast area is commonly known as Siberia,
6 although Russians normally use the word Sibir’ (Siberia) to refer only to
7 the part of North Asia that is landlocked or facing the Arctic. The Russian
8 concept of ‘Siberia’ excludes the peninsulas and islands that form the
9 North Pacific Rim. From west to east, Siberia begins at the eastern side
10 of the Ural Mountains conventionally held to divide Europe from Asia.
11 Its western half is taken up by the Ob-Irtysh basin and the West Siberian
12 Plain – the world’s most extensive wetland. The central portion of North
13 Asia could be said to begin with the Yenisei River, which separates the
14 low-lying Ob-Irtysh watershed from the hilly uplands of the Central
15 Siberian Plateau, which in geological terms represents an originally separate
16 continent. The Yenisei’s three largest tributaries – the Upper Tunguska,
17 Mountain Tunguska, and the Angara – all flow into it from these eastern
18 highlands. The core of the area sometimes referred to as ‘central Siberia’
19 is thus the Yenisei River boundary between two geologically and ecolog-
20 ically different worlds: the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian
21 Plateau. Moving eastward across North Asia, the Central Siberian Plateau
22 gives way to the expansive watershed of the Lena River, then to the low-lying
23 Yablonovy, Stanovoi, and Verkhoyansk mountain ranges that run in a
24 sprawling, irregular diagonal across southeastern to northeastern Siberia.
25 Eastward still, beyond Siberia proper, lies North Asia’s continuation of the
26 Pacific Rim, which contains the Chukotka Peninsula, Kamchatka, Russia’s
27 Maritime Province where Vladivostok is located, Sakhalin Island and the
28 Kurile Island chain. Southern Sakhalin and the Kuriles were under Japanese
29 rule before 1945. Viewed from south to north, North Asia begins with
30 the Inner Eurasian short-grass prairie (steppe), which quickly gives way
31 to a thick growth of conifers, birch, and aspen called the taiga – a boreal
32 forest more extensive than the Amazonian rain forest. In the Arctic, the
33 taiga gives way to tundra wherever permafrost lies too near the soil’s
34 surface to permit tree growth. As one travels from west to east, the tundra
35 reaches increasingly southward in proportion to the weakening of the Gulf
36 Stream that brings relatively more warmth and moisture to western Siberia.
37 The only high mountains are the rugged Altai-Sayan of south-central
38 Siberia and the majestic volcanic peaks of southern Kamchatka and the
39 Kuriles. These volcanoes form part of the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire
40 and are geologically unrelated to the rest of North Asia. A good general
41 introduction to North Asian physical and biological geography, with
42 maps, can be found online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia.
43 North Asia (i.e., the whole area approximating the westerner’s generic
44 conception of ‘Siberia’) represents a worthwhile linguistic subdivision of
45 the world’s language picture for several reasons. Although dominated by
© 2008 The Author Language and Linguistics Compass 2 (2008): 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00110.x
The Languages of Siberia 3
1 pastoral lifestyles – reindeer breeding across most of the taiga and tundra,
2 horse and cattle breeding among the Turkic and Mongol societies of the
3 southern forest-steppe fringe and the Yakut in the Lena River basin –
4 Siberia has been peripheral to the steppe-dominated history of Inner
5 Eurasia. Therefore, its people share many historical commonalities as a
6 repository of influences from the pastoral nomads of the steppes. Another
7 major factor uniting these peoples is their political, cultural, and linguistic
8 domination by the Russian Empire and subsequently the Soviet Union
9 and Russian Federation during the past four centuries. Every one of the
10 three dozen or so surviving languages and major dialects indigenous to
11 North Asia before the Russians’ arrival in 1582 is now a minority language,
12 if not extinct, throughout their former territories, with the notable
13 exception of Tuvan on the Mongolian border. Finally, this area was the
14 probable staging ground for prehistoric migrations into Alaska. The
15 traditionally non-pastoral peoples that survive in North Asia – the Ket,
16 Nivkh, Itelmen, and even the Ainu, who today no longer belong to
17 North Asia geopolitically – cannot be properly understood without
18 estimation of the historic interplay between the pastoral influence from
19 Inner Asia during the past two millennia and the autochthonous North
20 Asian hunter–gatherer lifestyles, some of which preserve cultural if not
21 linguistic affinities that appear closer to Native North America than to the
22 rest of Asia.
23
24
Modern Language Families and Demographics
25
26 The present article examines the linguistic picture across the whole of
27 Russian Asia, including both Siberia proper and North Asia’s Pacific Rim,
28 with a focus on languages spoken by indigenous groups prior to the Cossack
29 Yermak’s disruption of the Khanate of Sibir in 1582, the event that signaled
30 the beginning of intensive contact with Russian. Most languages native to
31 North Asia have geopolitically more prominent genetic cousins outside
32 this region. This is especially true of Uralic, Turkic, and Mongolic, but
33 could also be said of Tungusic, as well, in light of the Tungus-Manchu
34 languages traditionally spoken in north China. The Ob-Ugrian and
35 Samoyedic languages of western Siberia belong to the larger Uralic family,
36 and although the location of the original Uralic homeland is still debated
37 (one possibility being southwestern Siberia), the family’s sociolinguistically
38 most prominent members – Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian – are found
39 Europe. Turkic and Mongolic are families that probably originated in the
40 steppes of Central Asia or somewhere along the forest-steppe fringe of
41 southern Siberia; most speakers of these languages today are found in
42 Inner Asia rather than Siberia. Even the Tungusic languages and dialects
43 that dominated eastern Siberia before the coming of the Russians and
44 expansion of the Turkic Yakut are historically connected with the peoples
45 of Manchuria and the Amur River (cf. Janhunen 1996 for a historical
4 Edward Vajda
1 survey of the languages and peoples of greater Manchuria). Except for Ket
2 in central Siberia, the so-called Paleo-Asiatic or Paleo-Siberian languages
3 are primarily languages of the North Pacific Rim rather than Siberia. This
4 group comprises Yukaghir, Chukchi-Koryak-Itelmen, Nivkh, and a few
5 forms of Eskimoan – an assortment of genetically unrelated microfamilies
6 and isolates that occupy various corners of extreme Northeastern Asia.
7 The three documented varieties of ‘Siberian’ Yupik represent either an
8 Asian remnant (probable in the case of Sirenik) or a back colonization
9 (Naukan, Chaplino) of the Eskimo-Aleut family extending across the
10 North American Arctic. Only the totally unrelated Yeniseic (or Yeniseian)
11 microfamily, which contains modern-day Ket and several documented
12 extinct relatives, appears truly autochthonous to Siberia proper.
13 Beginning during the early Soviet era, the native peoples of North Asia
14 have been conventionally grouped into 26 numerically small ethnic
15 groups, with populations generally below 35,000. There are three much
16 larger groups – Yakut, Buryat, and Tuvan – numbering into the hundreds
17 of thousands. However, this total does not include native groups that
18 disappeared since the 18th century. Several Yeniseic and Samoyedic languages
19 spoken in the Upper Yeniseic region north of the Altai-Sayan Mountains
20 died out during the 18th and 19th centuries. The ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ areas of
21 northeastern-most Asia similarly have lost a number of distinct varieties
22 of what is usually described as dialects of Yukaghir, Koryak, and Itelmen,
23 to say nothing of the evacuation of Ainu into northern Japan from South
24 Sakhalin and the Kuriles in 1945. Nor does the official roster of northern
25 peoples reveal that some ethnic groups designated as single nations under
26 Soviet rule speak mutually unintelligible forms of speech rather than mere
27 dialects of the same language, as conventionally interpreted. This especially
28 concerns forms of Ob-Ugrian (Khanty, Mansi), the Samoyedic language
29 Selkup, as well as Ewenki, Ewen, Khakas, and Altai Turkic (note that the
30 first two are often spelled ‘Evenki’ and ‘Even’ following the Russian
31 transliteration even though the first consonant is not a true labiodental).
32 The true linguistic map of North Asia today is therefore more diverse
33 than the official ethnic divisions might suggest. It was still more diverse
34 during the first centuries of Tsarist rule over these areas. The linguistic
35 map of Siberia was probably far more diverse in prehistory, before the
36 spread of pastoral groups across most of this area. During the past few
37 millennia, the reindeer-herding ancestors of modern Ugric, Samoyedic,
38 and Tungusic speakers repopulated nearly all of North Asia, with the
39 exception of the Yeniseic-speaking areas of the upper and middle reaches
40 of the Yenisei River and the sea-mammal hunting communities of extreme
41 northeastern Siberia and the North Pacific Rim. The so-called ‘Paleo-
42 Asiatic’ groups inhabiting these areas in historic times are probably the
43 remnants of a once highly diverse linguistic and ethnic mosaic in the
44 prehistoric Asian taiga and tundra, perhaps rivaling that found in North
45 America upon the arrival of Europeans to that continent. Recent
1 sociolinguistic statistics on North Asian language can be found in Kibrik

2 (1991), Krauss (1997), Neroznak (1994), and Salminen (1997a). Online
3 resources include http://lingsib.iea.ras.ru/en and http://www.helsinki.fi/
4 ~tasalmin/rf.html.
5
6
Syncrhonic Treatments of North Asian Languages
7
8 It is hardly possible here even to begin to do justice toward acknowledging
9 all of the numerous accomplishments of the Russian-speaking and German-
10 speaking linguists and ethnographers (many of them of Finnish or
11 Hungarian nationality) who have studied and written about North Asia
12 during the past two centuries. By way of partial apology, I would urge
13 anyone interested in Siberia to learn Russian and German to become
14 acquainted firsthand with much of the seminal, foundation literature on
15 this region of the world. The best general English-language introduction
16 and reference covering all the language of North Asia remains the appro-
17 priate sections of Bernard Comrie’s (1981) Languages of the Soviet Union,
18 which goes far toward satisfying both linguist and layman alike. Two recent
19 publications in English that offer useful historiographic compilations of at
20 least part of the vast extant literature on Siberian linguistics are Anderson
21 (2004b) for central Siberia, and Vajda (2001) for the Yeniseic peoples and
22 languages. The present historiography will limit itself to select highlights
23 from the past as well as the most accessible or most recent English-
24 language publications.
25 While no substantial documentation of North Asian languages was
26 undertaken before the 18th and 19th centuries, the recording of southeastern
27 Siberian languages technically began with the proper names mentioned in
28 ancient Chinese writings such as the Xiong Nu words found in early Han
29 documents (Vovin 2000). Western Siberian languages were first recorded
30 in the seventeenth century in the form of toponyms and word lists taken
31 down by explorers and travelers. The scientific expeditions sent out by Peter
32 the Great or his successors collected a modest number of basic vocabulary
33 items from many languages and dialects of Siberia. Notable among these
34 earliest European publications is the two-volume compendium of vocab-
35 ulary edited by Peter Simon Pallas (1787–1789), which represented most
36 of the languages of North Asia, including several now extinct ones.
37 One of the earliest scholars to undertake substantial grammatical and lexical
38 documentation of Siberian languages was the brilliant and indefatigable
39 Finnish linguist Matthias Castrén (1813–1853). His pioneering grammars
40 of Ugrian, Samoyedic, and Yeniseic languages have not lost their scientific
41 relevance even today. In particular, Castrén’s grammar of ‘Yenisei-Ostyak’,
42 published posthumously by Franz Anton Schiefner (Castrén 1858),
43 remains of inestimable value, as it contains the only grammatical sketch of
44 the now extinct Kott language, based on Castrén’s intensive work with
45 the last five Kott speakers in the 1840s. During the early 20th century
6 Edward Vajda
1
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7
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10
11
Colour
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16
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21
22
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25 Fig. 1. Peoples and languages of Siberia in the twentieth century.
26
1 (Figure
27
28
1), Castrén’s work on Samoyedic and Ket was continued by his
countryman, Kai Donner (cf. Alatalo, Donner, and Sirelius 2004 for a
29 new Selkup dictionary that includes Donner’s Selkup dictionary materials).
30 As for early corpora of Ket vocabulary, both Castrén and Donner’s lexical
2
31
32
materials have been incorporated into Werner’s (2002) comprehensive
Yeniseic comparative dictionary. The Hungarian Antal Reguly made a
33 similarly groundbreaking study of Khanty (Ostyak) language and folklore
34 during the 1840s. His field notes were verified, supplemented, and sub-
35 sequently published by the prominent Uralist József Pápay (1910). The
36 works of the brilliant Finnish linguist Kustaa Fredrik Karjalainen, who
37 worked on Khanty dialects at the turn of the 20th century, have likewise
38 not lost their significance even today (cf. Karjalainen 1964, 1970).
39 During the Soviet era, a vast amount of serious work was undertaken
40 to document all of the languages of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
41 Important grammatical descriptions and dictionaries reflecting nearly
42 every surviving North Asian language and dialect appeared in the period
43 beginning in 1925. In that year, the so-called Committee of the North
44 was founded (Slezkine 1994), which led to an unprecedented burst of
45 scientific attention toward the languages and cultures of northern peoples.
1 This activity never fully abated, despite the disbanding of the committee
2 in the 1930s and the political suppression of most of its members. After
3 this period, seminal linguistic work was carried out both by scholars who
4 had been politically exiled to remote areas of Asia, as well as by those who
5 continued to work from scholarly centers such as Moscow and Leningrad.
6 One of the most remarkable scholars from the original membership of the
7 Committee of the North was Erukhim A. Kreinovich (1906–1985),
8 whose linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork on Nivkh, Yukaghir, and Ket
9 remains fundamentally important; cf. the short biographical sketches in
10 Black (1987) and Vajda (2001: 7, 169–74). Although Kreinovich endured
11 years of political repression, his work on these difficult and inaccessible
12 Siberian isolates could be ranked alongside the celebrated fieldwork
13 conducted by American linguist Edward Sapir on a host of similarly
14 diverse North American families. Another exiled scholar, Andreas Dul’zon
15 (1900–1973), founded an entire school of Siberian studies in Tomsk (cf.
16 Vajda 2001: 6–7, 95–112; Vajda 2003: vii–viii). It was Dul’zon who wrote
17 the first modern full-length grammar of Ket (Dul’zon 1968) and also
18 worked out the distribution of substrate Ket-related river names across
19 much of western and central Siberia (cf. map in Vajda 2001: xxvii). By
20 analyzing Tsarist fur-tax collection records archived in Leningrad, the
21 ethnographer Boris O. Dolgikh (1960) worked out the precise distribution
22 of North Asian tribes in the early seventeenth century, thereby helping
23 trace the historical processes leading to the contemporary distribution of
24 these peoples (cf. map in Vajda 2001: xxvi).
25 The Soviet and post-Soviet documentation of North Asian languages
26 by Russian-speaking scholars includes a wealth of dictionaries, monograph-
27 length grammars, and volumes of articles devoted to nearly every linguistic
28 facet of these languages. Noteworthy as general reference works are several
29 multi-volume treatments of the languages of Asiatic Russia, reflecting the
30 collaboration of numerous leading specialists on the individual languages.
31 These include the five-volume Languages of the peoples of the USSR,
32 published between 1966 and 1968 under different editors, and the three-
33 volume Languages of Asia and Africa (for a listing of each volume, cf. Comrie
34 1981: 294). During the past 15 years, similar references have appeared in
35 the multi-volume series Languages of the World, under the general editorship
36 of V. N. Yartseva (1993–97). Excellent descriptions of North Asian languages
37 can be found in the individual volumes devoted to Uralic (1993), Paleosi-
38 berian (1997), Turkic (1997), and Mongolic and Tungus-Manchu (1997).
39 High-quality dictionaries and grammars reflecting the state-of-the-art
40 knowledge of individual Siberian and Far Eastern languages have continued
41 to appear in Russia during the post-Soviet period. The best general treatment
42 of North Asian languages available to English readers remains Comrie (1981),
43 which makes superb use of the wealth of earlier Soviet-era descriptions.
44 Recently, thanks in large part to new opportunities for Westerners to
45 conduct fieldwork with indigenous languages of Siberia and the Russian
8 Edward Vajda
1 Far East, alongside the increased ability of Russian scholars to publish in

2 the West, many grammars and dictionaries of North Asian languages have
3 begun appearing in English or German. The series Routledge (now Curzon)
4 language family descriptions offers excellent general surveys of Turkic (Johanson
5 & Csató 1998), Uralic (Abondolo 1998), and Mongolic (Janhunen 2003)
6 containing individual descriptions of each Siberian member of these respective
7 families. Works on the synchronic grammar of individual languages include
8 Kämpfe & Volodin (1995) on Chukchi; Nedjalkov (1997) and Bulatova &
9 Grenoble (1999) on Ewenki; Künnap (1999a) on Enets; Erdal & Nevskaja
10 (2006) on the eastern Turkic languages, including Shor; Salminen (1997b)
11 on Nenets; Georg & Volodin (1999) on Itelmen; Anderson (1998) on
12 Khakas; Anderson & Harrison (1999) on Tuvan; Nikolaeva & Tolskaja (2001)
13 on Udihe; Riese (2001) on Northern Mansi; Nikolaeva (2003) on the
14 Northern Khanty Obdorsk dialect; Maslova (2003a,b) on Yukaghir;
15 and Werner (1997b), Vajda (2004), and Georg (2007) on Ket.
16 A number of recent publications in Western languages come from émigré
17 linguists, such as the Uralicist Eugen Helimski (formerly of Moscow). Such
18 scholars have done much to further the linguistic study of Siberia outside
19 the borders of the former Soviet Union (for example, cf. Helimski 1997,
20 for an excellent description of the extinct Southern Samoyedic language
21 Mator). The Siberianist Elena Skribnik, originally part of the superb team
22 of linguists at Novosibirsk State University, has worked at the University
23 of Munich during the past decade (cf. Skribnik 2004 for a good general
24 overview of Siberian languages published in German). The highly
25 productive Ketologist Heinrich Werner (G. K. Verner), who began his
26 career as a student of Andreas Dulson in Tomsk, another classic center of
27 Siberian studies, has lived since 1991 in Bonn, Germany. During this period,
28 he has produced over a dozen new monographs on Yeniseic linguistics (cf.
29 the biographic sketch in Vajda 2003: 3–7). Werner’s three-volume Yeniseic
30 dictionary (Werner 2002) set a new standard for the lexicographic
31 description of these languages. His recent monographs also include
32 important new descriptions of extinct languages: Kott (Werner 1997a),
3
33
34
Yugh (1997b), as well as the enormously useful compilation and analysis
of all 18th century documentation of Yeniseic languages (Werner 2005).
35 Other publications on now-extinct languages includes Ago Künnap’s
36 grammatical sketch of Kamass (Künnap 1999b), based on work with that
37 language’s last native speaker. The American team of Gregory Anderson
38 and David Harrison, who have conducted extensive fieldwork among the
39 various Turkic languages and dialects of south Siberia, are currently
40 preparing monograph-length grammars of Chulym Turkic and Tofa
41 (Tofalar). Their work builds on important earlier work by Andreas Dulson
42 and V. I. Rassadin, respectively. Linguist and population geneticist Brigitte
43 Pakendorf of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
44 Leipzig, has produced important research on Yakut (cf. Pakendorf 2007).
45 American linguist Jonathan Bobaljik is studying Itelmen (cf. Bobaljik
1 2005, 2006). Stefan Georg, the first Westerner to undertake modern

2 linguistic fieldwork with the Ket in their Yenisei homeland, is currently
3 preparing a companion volume to his monograph Ket phonology and
4 morphology (Georg 2007), which will describe the syntax and include
5 many hitherto unpublished texts. Edward Vajda is also gathering materials
6 for a comprehensive grammar of Ket, to be published in the Mouton
7 Grammar Library. Broader collaboration between Russian and Western
8 linguists is proving crucial to the success of such endeavors.
9
10
Typology and Areal Linguistics
11
12 Siberia shows a number of characteristics typical of a language area (cf.
13 Anderson 2003, 2004b). Fortescue (1998: 60–78) enumerates over 50
14 traits present over significant portions of this region or which are shared
15 between two or more families, suggesting successive waves of areal
16 influence left by different historical migrations, the latest of which, before
17 the arrival of Russians in the past four centuries, involved the northward
18 movement of pastoral groups. At the same time, the genetically diverse
19 languages spoken across North Asia contain numerous typologically
20 idiosyncratic traits, as well. This is particularly true of the genetically
21 diverse isolates and microfamilies subsumed under the ‘Paleosiberian’
22 designation. The present section will survey the phonologies, morphologies,
23 and syntax of North Asian languages from both vantage points.
24 The most salient complex of typological features uniting most languages
25 of this area, as well as those of Inner Asia, is the widespread prevalence
26 of SOV word order, dependent marking, postpositions, and suffixal agglu-
27 tination. Some of these shared commonalities are undoubtedly due to
28 genetic inheritance, although language contact has also played a pervasive
29 role among Inner Eurasia’s pastoral peoples, a fact that arguably qualifies
30 much of North Asia as a linguistic area in the true sense of the word.
31 Anderson (2003, 2004b) notes the prevalence of fairly elaborate case-
32 marking systems with largely locative functions. Case systems become
33 typically more elaborate as one moves from western to eastern Siberia.
34 North Asian languages typically have relatively simple vowel systems,
35 sometimes augmented by phonemic length distinctions. Vowel harmony
36 is prevalent in Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages – families that
37 are extremely widespread across the area under consideration, and seems
38 to have spread to adjacent languages as well (cf. Filchenko 2007 for a
39 discussion of vowel harmony phenomena in eastern Khanty). Ergative
40 morphosyntax is found in Chukchi as well as in Eskimoan, and ergative
41 traits have also been identified among the largely nominative–accusative
42 Uralic languages of western Siberia (Comrie 1978; Kulonen 1989),
43 although the origin of these features is unclear.
44 Unusual, or at least areally isolated typological traits include the system
45 of grammaticalized focus marking in Yukaghir (Comrie 1981: 259;
10 Edward Vajda
1 Maslova 2003a), the use of reduplication in the Chukotko-Kamchatkan

2 noun to mark absolutive forms, and the presence of multiple forms of
3 number words in Nivkh signaling the semantic classification of the item
4 being counted. The most basic numerals in Nivkh show over two dozen
5 forms; some are used generically for counting human nouns, others for
6 items as specific as fishing nets (Gruzdeva 1998). Number classification
7 systems using particles placed between the number and noun are prevalent
8 in East Asia, but nothing remotely similar to the unique Nivkh numeral
9 allomorphs exists anywhere in North Asia. Among North Asia’s isolates,
10 Ket perhaps has the largest number of unusual features. These include a
11 system of phonemic tones that involve melody, vowel length and laryn-
12 gealization (Werner 1997b; Vajda 2004; Georg 2007). Ket also possesses a
13 polypersonal verb containing up to eight prefixal morpheme classes.
14 Subject/object agreement is lexically conditioned, with two productive
15 transitive agreement marker configurations and five productive intransitive
16 configurations, along with several more found in only a handful of verbs
17 (Vajda 2004). This unique system of verb-internal actant marking – which
18 Vajda (in press 2) argues developed when an originally prefixing verb
19 morphology restructured itself to become suffixing – has no true analog
20 anywhere in the world. Noun incorporation is also present in Ket,
21 although restricted to a handful of verb roots. Elsewhere in North Asia,
22 Chukchi possesses a highly productive system of incorporation that allows
23 entire noun phrases to be included inside the verb form (Kämpfe &
24 Volodin 1995). In the realm of phonology, in addition to the Ket tones,
25 the most unusual features are the extremely high ratio of consonants to
26 vowels in Itelmen (Georg & Volodin 1999) and patterns of root-initial
27 consonant mutations that occur in Nivkh compound word formation
28 (Gruzdeva 1998; Mattissen 2003).
29 Earlier contributions of an understanding of Siberian areal typology
30 include studies of individual grammatical and phonological traits prevalent
4
31 across Uralic by Itkonen (1955), Serebrennikov (1964), and Collinder
5
32
33
(1965). Recent works that contribute material on the typology of North
Asian languages include Anderson’s (2004a) monograph on auxiliary verb
34 constructions in Altai-Sayan Turkic, as well as Anderson (2006), which
35 contains numerous examples of the use and development of auxiliary verbs
36 in Siberian languages. There is also an edited volume of 14 studies on
37 complex sentence formation in North Asian languages (Vajda in press 1).
38
39
Perspectives on the Linguistic Prehistory of North Asia
40
41 One general feature of Siberia’s linguistic prehistory appears fairly clear.
42 When the Russians arrived in the late 16th or early 17th century, most
43 of North Asia contained languages brought northward from Inner Eurasia
44 through migrations of reindeer breeding or stockbreeding peoples during
45 the past three millennia. In western Siberia, these migrations led to the
1 widespread distribution of Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup)

2 and Ob-Ugrian (Khanty, Mansi) languages. In eastern Siberia, the northward
3 movement of reindeer breeders resulted in an even wider distribution of
4 Ewenki and Ewen dialects, with related Tungusic languages dominating
5 the Amur River basin and adjacent areas of the Russian Far East (Nanai,
6 Negidal, Ulcha, Oroch, and others). Mongolic speakers (the Buryat)
7 occupied an area south of Lake Baikal. To the west, Turkic speakers came
8 to dominate south-central Siberia, giving rise to the modern Khakas,
9 Altai, Shor, Tuvan, and Tofa languages. Some Turkic-speaking groups
10 moved from this area into the Lena River watershed to become today’s
11 Yakut (Sakha) people. The erstwhile population in all regions populated
12 by reindeer breeders was presumably absorbed or driven off, leaving only
13 a few remnant populations that today do not fit into any of Eurasia’s
14 widespread language families. These include the Ket and other, now
15 extinct, Yeniseic peoples in central Siberia, the Nivkh and Ainu in the
16 Far East, and finally the Yukaghir and Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen peoples
17 in the extreme northeast of Asia. Along with the Asiatic Eskimo on
18 Russia’s Bering Strait coast, all of these groups have been referred to as
19 ‘Paleosiberians’ or ‘Paleoasiatics’, a term that references their earlier presence
20 in North Asia. In this connection, the reindeer breeders might appropriately
21 be referred to as ‘Neo-Siberians’. With the exception of Chukchi and
22 Koryak, the ‘Paleosiberians’ are foragers – hunters, gatherers or fishers
23 without domesticated animals other than dogs used for transport. The fact
24 that the Chukchi and Koryak are reindeer breeders suggests that either
25 they adopted this lifestyle from incoming Tungusic tribes or themselves
26 are more recent migrants from the south, in other words, also ‘Neo-
27 Siberians’. Interestingly, the Itelmen of southern Kamchatka, whose
28 language falls into the same microfamily, are foragers, which suggests that
29 the Chukchi and Koryak reindeer pastoralism represents a later adaptation.
30 If this is true, then the use of the term ‘Paleo-Siberian’ for these groups
31 of reindeer breeders would be appropriate after all. Finally, in the dense
32 west Siberian taiga, the difference in subsistence pattern between hunter
33 and reindeer breeder did not always remain clearly delineated. Certain
34 originally reindeer-breeding communities – namely, the Forest Nenets,
35 eastern Khanty, and southern Selkup – adapted a hunting-based lifestyle
36 not starkly differentiated from their ‘Paleo-Siberian’ Ket neighbors; cf.
37 Jordan and Filchenko (2005) on the Khanty, and Jordan (2008) for a wide-
38 ranging discussion of how various native Siberian peoples accommodated
39 their lifestyle to the local geography.
40 It is important to bear in mind that ‘Paleo-Siberian’ refers to an assort-
41 ment of language isolates and microfamilies rather than to a language
42 family. It is also crucial to realize that much of the original linguistic
43 diversity of North Asia – diversity perhaps even approximating that found
44 in pre-contact North America – was largely erased on the Asian side by
45 the historically recent expansion of pastoral groups. Although the modern
12 Edward Vajda
1 languages of North Asia undoubtedly contain some substrate influence

2 from the hunter–gatherer languages they replaced, this influence is very
3 difficult to trace with any certainty. Efforts to detect traces of language
4 mixing involving two or more documented languages (cf. Anderson 2004b;
5 Vajda in press 1) have been more successful. In particular, south Siberian
6 Turkic has been shown to include substrate influence from bygone Samoyedic
7 and Yeniseic languages, and Yakut shows significant influence from Ewenki.
8 This is particularly true of Dolgan, a Turkic language closely related to Yakut
9 and spoken on the Taimyr Peninsula by a population known to have derived
10 from Ewenki groups who underwent Turkicization in the 17th century
11 (Pakendorf 2007). An areal study of the whole of North Asia that might
12 venture to hypothesize on substrates left over from undocumented
13 ‘Paleosiberian’ languages has yet to be undertaken, although Fortescue’s
14 (1998) pioneering areal study of Greater Beringia (the land on both sides
15 of Bering Strait) goes a long way in this direction. The toponymy of wide
16 stretches of North Asia likewise awaits its researcher. Such future studies
17 might shed additional light on the spread of pastoralists and the formerly
18 much wider distribution of hunter–gatherer languages.
19 Recent research into the linguistic prehistory of North Asia can be
20 divided into studies that seek to more fully elucidate the internal history
21 of generally accepted language families and those that propose new con-
22 nections between individual families or isolates. Among studies of the first
23 category, important comparative or etymological dictionaries have been
24 published on a number of North Asian languages. These include Heinrich
25 Werner’s three-volume comparative dictionary of Yeniseic (Werner 2003),
26 Irina Nikolaeva’s (2006) comparative dictionary of Yukaghir dialects, and
27 Michael Fortescue’s (2005) dictionary of Chukchi-Kamchatkan (a micro-
28 family including Itelmen). Oleg Mudrak’s etymological dictionary of
29 Chukchi-Kamchatkan (Mudrak 2000), published in Russian, should also
30 be mentioned here, as well as a comparative Eskimo dictionary (Fortescue
31 et al. 1994), for which a second edition is currently being prepared.
32 Recent volumes of collected works devoted to Mongolic (Janhunen 2003),
33 Uralic (Abondolo 1998), and Turkic (Johanson and Csató 1998) contain
34 chapters on linguistic prehistory and the respective proto-languages. A
35 number of important works by Claus Schönig have appeared on Turkic
36 diachronic linguistics, notably Schönig (2001) for south Siberian Turkic.
37 Gyula Déscy has published monographs devoted to the reconstruction of
38 Proto-Uralic (Déscy 1990) and Proto-Turkic (Déscy 1998). Gerhard Doerfer’s
39 (2004) etymological dictionary of the Tungus-Manchu languages, with
40 its focus on the languages of Manchuria, provides an excellent com-
41 panion to Tsintsius’s (1975–1977) two-volume comparative dictionary
42 of the Tungusic languages. An etymological dictionary of Yeniseic is
43 currently in preparation (Vajda and Werner in preparation). Finally,
44 Sergei S. Starostin’s reconstructions of several Eurasian proto-languages are
45 accessible online at (http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/main.cgi?flags=eygtnnl)
1 on a Web site that continues to be maintained and updated by his son

2 George Starostin.
3 A number of recent studies center on questions of genetic relatedness
4 involving North Asian languages. A few have challenged the existence of
5 generally accepted language families, notably Angela Marcantonio’s (2002)
6 monograph asserting that there was no Uralic language family, a position
7 that has not received support, as the evidence linking the various branches
8 of Uralic remains compelling. Another is A. P. Volodin’s view that Itelmen
9 is not genetically related to Chukchi-Koryak, with the grammatical and
10 lexical parallels shared between these languages interpreted rather as arising
11 from extensive language contact (cf. Georg and Volodin 1999). While the
12 position of Itelmen as belonging to Chukchi-Kamchatkan appears justified
13 (cf. Fortescue 1998, 2005; Mudrak 2000), the strong divergence in
14 phonology, lexicon, and grammatical structure exhibited by Itelmen
15 vis-à-vis Chukchi and Koryak certainly deserves further attention, as it
16 could be due to some hitherto undetermined substrate (cf. Fortescue 1998).
17 One recent hypothesis on the deep genetic relations between North
18 Asian languages is Joseph Greenberg’s two-volume work on Eurasiatic
19 (Greenberg 2000–2002), a phylum that includes all languages of the
20 region except for Ket. While only a minority of historical linguists accepts
21 this group, or the somewhat similar Nostratic Hypothesis, Greenberg’s
22 examination of tongue-root harmony features and pronouns, particularly
23 the widespread m/t distinction in first- and second-person pronouns across
24 much of northern Eurasia, reveal important commonalities that are difficult
25 to attribute to chance or diffusion (cf. Vajda 2003 for a review). The Altaic
26 hypothesis (i.e. the assertion that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungus-Manchu
27 form a demonstrable genetic family) continues unabated to generate
28 important new publications by its supporters, most notably a three-volume
29 etymological dictionary (Starostin et al. 2003) and a monograph supporting
30 the Altaic affiliations of Japanese and Korean (Robbeets 2005), as well as
31 strong refutations by its opponents (cf. reviews of these books by Georg
32 2005, forthcoming; Vovin 2005). The issue of whether Yukaghir is an
33
34
6 isolate or can be related to Uralic (Nikolaeva 2005) remains moot. Fortescue
(1998) cites typological parallels to support a genetic link between Uralic,
35 Eskimo-Aleut, Yukaghir, and perhaps Chukotko-Kamchatkan in a family
36 called ‘Uralo-Siberian’. The idea that Eskimo and Aleut might be related
37 to Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in the
38 early 19th century (Rask 1818). Recently, German linguist Uwe Seefloth
39 (2000) has proposed morphological evidence linking these two families.
40 As for Ket, Vajda (2008) has amassed new morphological and lexical
41 evidence supporting a link between Yeniseic and Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
42 in North America, a proposal that could shed light on the linguistic
43 affiliations of Siberia’s most intriguing language isolate. This proposal,
44 which echoes similar conclusions by Alfredo Trombetti (1923) and Merritt
45 Ruhlen (1998), would represent the first demonstrated connection
14 Edward Vajda
1 between exclusively Old World and New World language families (note
2 that the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family straddles Bering Strait). All
3 of these research proposals suggest that Siberian linguistics has much to
4 contribute to the understanding of human prehistory. Ongoing debates
5 on language classification suggest that this vast yet often overlooked region
6 has yet to divulge all of its discoverable secrets.
7
8
Acknowledgement
9
7 This
10
11
work was supported by Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
12
13
Short Biography
14
15 Edward J. Vajda is a professor of linguistics, Russian language, and Eurasian
16 Studies at Western Washington University, where he has taught for the
17 past 22 years. In 1992, he was awarded his university’s Excellence in
18 Teaching Award. He is currently the Director of Western’s Center for East
19 Asian Studies. His areas of expertise include complex verb morphologies
20 and historical-comparative linguistics, with a special focus on the languages
21 of native Siberia. His current work is primarily devoted to Ket, an endan-
22 gered isolate spoken by fewer than 200 people in villages near the Yenisei
23 River. He is one of the four editors of the New York based linguistics
24 journal Word.
25
26
Note
27
28 * Correspondence address: Edward J. Vajda, Western Washington University, Modern Languages,
29 MS-9057, 516 High Street, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA. E-mail: vajda@cc.wwu.edu.
30
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The Languages of Siberia

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1 sociolinguistic statistics on North Asian language can be found in Kibrik

1 Far East, alongside the increased ability of Russian scholars to publish in

1 2005, 2006). Stefan Georg, the first Westerner to undertake modern

1 Maslova 2003a), the use of reduplication in the Chukotko-Kamchatkan

1 widespread distribution of Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup)

1 languages of North Asia undoubtedly contain some substrate influence

1 on a Web site that continues to be maintained and updated by his son

1 Black, Lydia T. 1987. Iurii A. Kreinovich (1906–1985). International journal of American

Journal: Language and Linguistics Compass

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