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| Chukotko-Kamchatkan | |
|---|---|
| Chukchi–Kamchatkan, Luorawetlan | |
| Geographic distribution | Russian Far East |
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primarylanguage families |
| Proto-language | Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan |
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | chuk1271 |
 The distribution of Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages (red) in the 17th century (hatching, approximate) and at the end of the 20th century (solid). | |
TheChukotko-Kamchatkan orChukchi–Kamchatkan languages are alanguage family of extreme northeasternSiberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan isendangered. The Kamchatkan branch ismoribund, represented only byWestern Itelmen, with less than a hundred speakers left.[1] The Chukotkan branch had close to 7,000 speakers left (as of 2010, the majority being speakers ofChukchi), with a reported total ethnic population of 25,000.[2]
While the family is sometimes groupedtypologically and geographically asPaleosiberian, no external genetic relationship has been widely accepted as proven. The most popular such proposals have been for links withEskimo–Aleut, either alone or in the context of a wider grouping.
Less commonly encountered names for the family areChukchian,Chukotian,Chukotan,Kamchukchee andKamchukotic. Of these,Chukchian,Chukotian andChukotan are ambiguous, since the three terms are sometimes used to refer specifically to the family's northern branch; the last two names are portmanteau words referring to both branches.
In addition,Luorawetlan (also spelledLuoravetlan) has been in wide use since 1775 as a name for the family, although it is properly the self-designation of one of its constituent languages,Chukchi.
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan family consists of two distantly relateddialect clusters,Chukotkan andKamchatkan. Chukotkan is considered anywhere from three to five languages, whereas there is only one surviving Kamchatkan language,Itelmen.
The relationship of the Chukotkan languages to Itelmen is at best distant, and has been met with only partial acceptance by scholars.
All the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are under pressure fromRussian. Almost all speakers are bilingual in Russian, and few members of the ethnic groups associated with the languages born after 1970 speak any language but Russian.
The accepted classification is this:
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages have no generally accepted relation to any other language family. There are several theories about possible relationships to existing or hypothetical language families.
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are sometimes classified among thePaleosiberian 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 ofTurkic andTungusic.
Joseph Greenberg identifies Chukotko-Kamchatkan (which he names Chukotian) as a member ofEurasiatic, a proposedmacrofamily that includesIndo-European,Altaic, andEskimo–Aleut, among others. Greenberg also assignsNivkh andYukaghir, sometimes classed as "Paleosiberian" languages, to the Eurasiatic family.
While the Eurasiatic hypothesis has been well received byNostraticists and someIndo-Europeanists, it remains very controversial. Part of the reason is that the Eurasiatic hypothesis rests onmass comparison of lexemes, grammatical formatives, and vowel systems (see Greenberg 2000–2002), rather than on the prevailing view that regular sound correspondences that are linked to a wide array of lexemes and grammatical formatives are the only valid means to establishgenetic relationship (see for instance Baldi 2002:2–19).
Murray Gell-Mann,Ilia Peiros, andGeorgiy Starostin group Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages andNivkh withAlmosan instead of Eurasiatic.[3]
In 1998,Michael Fortescue, a specialist inEskimo–Aleut as well as in Chukotko-Kamchatkan, argued for a link betweenUralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo–Aleut[4] calling this proposed groupingUralo-Siberian.
In 2011, Fortescue instead suggested thatNivkh (Gilyak, Amuric), another Paleo-Siberian language, is related to Chukotko-Kamchatkan on the basis of morphological, typological, and lexical evidence as the closest relative of Chukotko-Kamchatkan[5] and came to prefer an interpretation of the similarities to Uralo-Siberian through language contact.[6] Together, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkh could form a larger Chukotko-Kamchatkan-Amuric language family, and their common ancestor might have been spoken 4000 years ago.
In a 2015 paper,Gerhard Jäger of the University of Tübingen reported "intriguing" and "controversial" findings regarding Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Indo-European and other language families. Using a variant ofmass lexical comparison, augmented bycomputational linguistic techniques, such as large-scale statistical analysis, Jäger investigated "deepgenetic relations" between many different language families. To increase the chances that genuine genetic relationships were detected, he eliminated from consideration "roguetaxa," languages and families that had ambiguous positions because of random similarities or recentlanguage contact.
Jäger found evidence that Chukotko-Kamchatkan and theIndo-European languages had statistically-significant similarities with each other, suggesting that they may have once formed part of aclade. On the whole, similarities between the two families were greater than either shared with any other language family. That was the case even when Jäger factored in similarities in phonology that were likely random coincidences (such as a "surprisingly high number" of resemblances in vocabulary between Chukotko-Kamchatkan and theGoidelic branch of the Celtic languages).
According to Jäger, when these "rogue taxa" were removed, theconfidence value of a notional "Indo-European/Chukotko-Kamchatkan clade" fell only slightly, from 0.969 to a still statistically-significant 0.964.[7]
The dictionary definition ofAppendix:Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan reconstructions at Wiktionary| Chukotko-Kamchatkan |
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| Yeniseian |
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| Yukaghir | ||||||
| Nivkh | ||||||
| Ainu | ||||||
| Eskaleut | ||||||
| Proposed groupings | ||||||
Italics indicateextinct languages | ||||||
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| National | |
