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Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
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The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are a language family of northeastern Siberia. The family is also known as Chukchi-Kamchatkan.
Less commonly encountered names for this family are Chukchian, Chukotian, Chukotan, Kamchukchee and Kamchukotic. Of these, Chukchian and Chukotian are ambiguous, since both terms sometimes refer specifically to the family's northern branch.
Adding to the confusion, Luorawetlan, also spelled Luoravetlan, has been widely used since 1775 as the name of the family, although it is properly the self-designation of its main component language.
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Encyclopedia
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are a language family of northeastern Siberia. The family is also known as Chukchi-Kamchatkan.
Less commonly encountered names for this family are Chukchian, Chukotian, Chukotan, Kamchukchee and Kamchukotic. Of these, Chukchian and Chukotian are ambiguous, since both terms sometimes refer specifically to the family's northern branch.
Adding to the confusion, Luorawetlan, also spelled Luoravetlan, has been widely used since 1775 as the name of the family, although it is properly the self-designation of its main component language. The derivative Luorawetlanic is perhaps preferable as a name for the family.
Languages of the family
The family consists of five languages. It is divided into a northern and a southern branch.
The northern branch, sometimes called Chukotian in a narrow sense (or better, Chukotkan or Chukotic), is spoken in two autonomous regions which lie at the extreme northeast of Russia, bounded on the east by the Pacific and on the north by the Arctic. It includes four closely related languages:
- Chukchi, also called Luorawetlan (Luoravetlan), spoken mostly within Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
- Koryak, also called Nymylan, spoken in Koryak Okrug of Kamchatka Krai. The main dialect is known as Chavchuven Koryak.
- Alutor (Aliutor, Alyutor), also spoken in Koryakia. According to Fortescue (2005), Palana Koryak and Alutor should be considered dialects of a single language.
- Kerek, spoken along the southern coast of Chukotka. In 1997 two elderly speakers remained, but now the language is extinct, with the ethnic group assimilated into the Chukchi (Fortescue 2005: 1).
The southern branch (termed Kamchatkan or Kamchatic) 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 Chukotkan 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 generally accepted relation to any other language family. They are sometimes classed among the Paleosiberian languages, a catch-all term for language groups with no identified relationship to one another that are believed to represent remnants of the language map of Siberia prior to the advances of Turkic and Tungusic.
Joseph Greenberg identifies Chukotko-Kamchatkan (which he names Chukotian) as a member of Eurasiatic, a proposed macrofamily that includes Indo-European, Altaic, and Eskimo-Aleut, among others. Greenberg also assigns Gilyak (Nivkh) and Yukaghir, sometimes classed as "Paleosiberian" languages, to the Eurasiatic family.
While the Eurasiatic hypothesis has been well received by Nostraticists and some Indo-Europeanists, it remains extremely controversial at the present time. Part of the reason for this is that the Eurasiatic hypothesis rests on mass comparison of lexemes, grammatical formatives, and vowel systems (see Greenberg 2000-2002) rather than on the prevailing view that regular sound correspondences, linked to a wide array of lexemes and grammatical formatives, are the only valid means to establish genetic relationship (see for instance Baldi 2002:2-19).
Michael Fortescue, a specialist in Eskimo-Aleut as well as in Chukotko-Kamchatkan, argues for a link between Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut in Language Relations Across Bering Strait (1998). He calls this proposed grouping Uralo-Siberian.
See also
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