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Chukotko-Kamchatkan Peoples
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers traditionally were indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders. Chukotko-Kamchatkan is endangered. The Kamchatkan branch is moribund, represented only by Western Itelmen, with only 4 or 5 elderly speakers left. The Chukotkan branch had close to 7,000 speakers left (as of 2010, the majority being speakers of Chukchi), with a reported total ethnic population of 25,000. While the family is sometimes grouped typologically and geographically as Paleosiberian, no external genetic relationship has been widely accepted as proven. The most popular such proposals have been for links with Eskimo–Aleut, either alone or in the context of a wider grouping. Alternative names Less commonly encountered names for the family are Chukchian, Chukotian, Chukotan, Kamchukchee and Kamchukotic. Of these, ''Chukchian'' and ''Chukotian'' are ambiguous, since both terms ar ...
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Russian Far East
The Russian Far East (russian: Дальний Восток России, r=Dal'niy Vostok Rossii, p=ˈdalʲnʲɪj vɐˈstok rɐˈsʲiɪ) is a region in Northeast Asia. It is the easternmost part of Russia and the Asian continent; and is administered as part of the Far Eastern Federal District, which is located between Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. The area's largest city is Khabarovsk, followed by Vladivostok. The region shares land borders with the countries of Mongolia, China, and North Korea to its south, as well as maritime boundaries with Japan to its southeast, and with the United States along the Bering Strait to its northeast. The Russian Far East is often considered as a part of Siberia (previously during the Soviet era when it was called the Soviet Far East). Terminology In Russia, the region is usually referred to as just "Far East" (). What is known in English as the Far East is usually referred to as "the Asia-Pacific Region" (, ab ...
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Dialect Cluster
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the Chinese languages or dialects, and subgroups of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Leonard Bloomfield used the name dialect area. Charles F. Hockett used the term L-complex. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves. In this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical. In ...
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Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct. Today, the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Hindi–Urdu, Spanish, Bengali, French, Russian, Portuguese, German, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an ...
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Macrofamily
In historical linguistics, a macrofamily, also called a superfamily or phylum, is a proposed genetic relationship grouping together language families (also isolates) in a larger scale classification. Campbell, Lyle and Mixco, Mauricio J. (2007), ''A Glossary of Historical Linguistics'', University of Utah Press/Edinburgh University Press. However, Campbell Campbell, Lyle (2004), ''Historical Linguistics: An Introduction'', Edinburgh University Press. regards this term as superfluous, preferring "language family" for those classifications for which there is consensus and "distant genetic relationship" for those for which there is no, or not yet, consensus, whether due to lack of documentation or scholarship of the constituent languages, or to an estimated time depth thought by many linguists to be too great for reconstruction. More rarely, the term has also been applied to an exceptionally old, large and diverse language family, such as Afro-Asiatic. Diakonoff, Igor M. (1996), "S ...
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Eurasiatic Languages
Eurasiatic is a proposed language macrofamily that would include many language families historically spoken in northern, western, and southern Eurasia. The idea of a Eurasiatic superfamily dates back more than 100 years. Joseph Greenberg's proposal, dating to the 1990s, is the most widely discussed version. In 2013, Mark Pagel and three colleagues published what they believe to be statistical evidence for a Eurasiatic language family. The branches of Eurasiatic vary between proposals, but typically include Altaic ( Mongolic, Tungusic and Turkic), Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, Indo-European, and Uralic—although Greenberg uses the controversial Uralic-Yukaghir classification instead. Other branches sometimes included are the Kartvelian and Dravidian families, as proposed by Pagel et al., in addition to the language isolates Nivkh, Etruscan and Greenberg's "Korean–Japanese–Ainu". Some proposals group Eurasiatic with even larger macrofamilies, such as Nostrat ...
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Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on May 28, 1915, to Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York. His first great interest was music. At the age of 14, he gave a piano concert in Steinway Hall. He continued to play the piano frequently throughout his life. After graduating from James Madison High School, he decided to pursue a scholarly career rather than a musical one. He enrolled at Columbia College in New York in 1932. During his senior year, he attended a class taught by Franz Boas concerning American Indian languages. He graduated in 1936 with a bachelor degree. With references from Boas and Ruth Benedict, he was accepted as a graduate student by Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University in Chicago and graduated in 1940 with a doctorate degree. During the cour ...
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Nivkh Language
Nivkh (; occasionally also Nivkhic; self-designation: Нивхгу диф, ''Nivxgu dif'', ), or Gilyak (), or Amuric, is a small language family, often portrayed as a language isolate, of two or three mutually unintelligible languages spoken by the Nivkh people in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Russian rendering of terms derived from the Tungusic "Gileke" and Manchu-Chinese "Gilemi" (Gilimi, Gilyami) for culturally similar peoples of the Amur River region, and was applied principally to the Nivkh in Western literature. The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897 and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so by the 1989 census there were only 1,079 first-language speakers left. ...
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Michael Fortescue
Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946) is a British-born linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht. He gained his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. Fortescue is known for his reconstructions of the Eskimo–Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, and Wakashan proto-languages. Education He was educated at Abingdon School. Career He is professor emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen and chairman of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen. His ''Comparative Eskimo Dictionary'', co-authored with Steven Jacobson and Lawrence Kaplan, is the standard work in its area, as is his ''Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan Dictionary''. In his book ''Whiteheadian Linguistics'', Fortescue explores the possibilities of a linguistic theory based on the philosophical theories of Alfred North Whitehead. Selected works A more complete listing is available in the Fes ...
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Tungusic Languages
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the dozen living languages of the Tungusic language family. Some linguists consider Tungusic to be part of the controversial Altaic language family, along with Turkic, Mongolic, and sometimes Koreanic and Japonic. The term "Tungusic" is from an exonym for the Evenk people (Ewenki) used by the Yakuts ("tongus"). It was borrowed into Russian as "тунгус", and ultimately transliterated into English as "Tungus". Classification Linguists working on Tungusic have proposed a number of different classifications based on different criteria, including morphological, lexical, and phonological characteristics. Some scholars have criticized the tree-based model of Tungusic classification, arguing the long history of contact among the Tungusic langu ...
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Turkic Languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender, are almost universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility, upon mod ...
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Kerek Language
Kerek (russian: link=no, Керекский язык) is an extinct language of Russia of the northern branch of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. On historical linguistic grounds it is most closely related to Koryak (both languages have a merger of the proto-Chuktotian phonemes /*ð/ and /*r/ with /*j/). The next closest relative is Chukchi (/*ð/ and /*r/ are merged, but not /*j/). In 1997 there were still two speakers remaining, but by 2005 the language was considered extinct. According to the 2010 census, there were 10 people claiming Kerek as their native language, a number which may include partial speakers and non-speakers who claim the language as part of their ethnic heritage. Over the 20th century many members of the Kerek ethnic group shifted to Chukchi, the language of the majority ethnic group in the area, but now most Chukchis and Kereks Kereks (autonym aӈӄalҕakku, ''angqalghakku'', "seaside people"; ) are an ethnic group of people in Russia. In the 2021 ...
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Alyutor Language
Alyutor or Alutor is a language of Russia that belongs to the Chukotkan branch of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. Sociolinguistic situation The Alutor are the indigenous inhabitants of the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The language is unwritten and moribund; in the 1970s residents of the chief Alutor village of Vyvenka under the age of 25 did not know the language. In recent years the Vyvenka village school has started teaching the language. Until 1958 the language was considered the "village" (settled) dialect of the Koryak language, but it is not intelligible with traditionally nomadic varieties of Koryak. The autonym means "villager". Orthography Typology Alutor is a polysynthetic language. The morphology is agglutinative, with extensive prefixes and suffixes. The argument structure is ergative. The word order is variable, and it is difficult to say which typology is basic. The verb-absolutive orders AVO and VAO are perhaps most common. Ph ...
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