Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages

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The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages (also Chukchi-Kamchatkan) are a language family of northeastern Siberia.

Languages of the family

The family consists of five languages. It is divided into a northern and a southern branch.

The northern branch is spoken in Chukotka, which lies at the extreme northeast of the Russian Federation. Chukotka is bounded on the east by the Pacific and on the north by the Arctic.

The northern branch, sometimes called Chukotian, includes four closely related languages:

Chukchi, spoken mostly within Chukotka.

Koryak, spoken in the Koryakia. The main dialect is known as Chavchuven Koryak.

Alutor, also spoken in Koryakia. According to Fortescue (2005), Palana Koryak and Alutor should be considered dialects of a single language.

Kerek, spoken along the sourthern coast of Chukotka. In 1997 only two elderly speakers remained, so the language may now be extinct, with the rest of the ethnic group now assimilated into the Chukchi.

The southern branch is spoken on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It now consists of a single language, although there are incomplete records attesting several others:

Itelmen, also called Kamchadal. It includes the Ukä and Sedanka dialects. Itelmen had 100 or fewer speakers in 1991, mostly of the older generation.

The relationship of the Chukotian languages to Itelmen is distant, and has only been conclusively demonstrated recently.

All the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are under pressure from Russian. Almost all speakers are bilingual in Russian, and most younger members of the ethnic groups associated with the languages speak Russian only.

Relation to other language families

The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages have no proven relation to any other language family. They are sometimes classed among the Paleosiberian languages, a catch-all term for language groups with no known kinship with one another that are believed to have been present in Siberia prior to the advances of Turkic and Tungusic.

One well-known hypothesis joining these languages to a larger group is that of the late Joseph Greenberg, who identified Chukotian (his name for Chukotko-Kamchatkan) as a branch of a super-family of languages that he calls Eurasiatic. Greenberg also assigns the Paleosiberian languages Gilyak (Nivkh) and Yukaghir to this super-family. This hypothesis remains controversial, as it relies on Greenberg's own Mass Lexical Comparison, rather than the conventional Comparative Method.

References

Fortescue, Michael (2005) Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary. Trends in Linguistics 23. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

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