CHUKOTKO-KAMCHATKAN LANGUAGES

The 'Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages' (commonly also 'Chukchi-Kamchatkan') are a language family of northeastern Siberia. Less commonly encountered synonyms for this family are 'Chukchian', 'Chukotian' (or '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' (or 'Luoravetlan') has been widely used as the family's name since 1775 although it is properly the self-designation of its main component language. (The derivative 'Luorawetlanic' is, perhaps, preferable as a family name.)

Contents

Languages of the family

Relation to other language families

References

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 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.
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).

References

★ Baldi, Philip. 2002. ''The Foundations of Latin''. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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

★ Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000. ''Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1, Grammar''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

★ Greenberg, Joseph H. 2002. ''Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 2, Lexicon''. Stanford: Stanford University Press.