Paleo-Siberian languages, Paleo-Siberian also spelled Paleosiberian, also called Paleo-Asiatic languages or Hyperborean languages, languages spoken in Asian Russia (Siberia) that belong to four genetically unrelated groups—Yeniseian, Luorawetlan, Yukaghir, and Nivkh.
The languages of the group
Yeniseian, Luorawetlan, and Nivkh
The Yeniseian group is spoken in the Turukhansk region along the Yenisey River. Its only living members are Ket (formerly called Yenisey-Ostyak), which is spoken by about 500 persons, and Yug, with no more than 5 speakers. Kott (Kot; also called Assan or Asan), Arin, and Pumpokol, now extinct members of this group, were spoken chiefly to the south of the present-day locus of Ket and Yug.
The Luorawetlan family consists of (1) Chukchi, spoken by no more than 11,000 people in the northeasternmost parts of Siberia, west of the small enclaves of Siberian Yupik (Eskimo), (2) Koryak, also called Nymylan, with approximately 3,500 speakers, spoken on northern Kamchatka and northward to the Anadyr River basin, (3) the strongly divergent but probably related Itelmen (or Kamchadal), with a bare remnant of 500 speakers on the central west coast of Kamchatka, (4) Aliutor, perhaps a Koryak dialect, with about 2,000 speakers, and (5) Kerek, with about 10 speakers.
Yukaghir (regional name Odul) is spoken by about 200 persons (less than 20 percent of the ethnic group) who are divided about equally into two enclaves: Tundra Yukaghir (also called Northern Yukaghir) in the Sakha republic (Yakutia), near the estuary of the Indigirka River; and Kolyma, or Forest, Yukaghir (also called Southern Yukaghir) along the bend of the Kolyma River. Extinct earlier dialects or languages related to Yukaghir are Omok and Chuvan (Chuvantsy); these were spoken south and southwest of the current Yukaghir area. Nivkh has about 1,000 speakers, roughly half of whom live in the estuary of the Amur River and the other half on Sakhalin Island.
Lack of a genetic relationship
These four groups are not related to each other. They have been subsumed under the names Paleo-Siberian, Paleo-Asiatic, or, more rarely, Hyperborean ever since the Baltic German zoologist and explorer Leopold von Schrenck surmised, in the middle of the 19th century, that they constituted the remnants of a formerly more widely dispersed language family that had been encroached upon by invading groups of Uralic and Altaic speakers. Schrenck’s hypothesis is quite correct to the extent that as recently as the 17th century Yeniseian, Luorawetlan, and Yukaghir languages were spoken over much wider territories than they are today. For example, it is known that Samoyed languages (of the Uralic family) at one time in the past absorbed the languages of now-extinct Yeniseian tribes, that Yukaghir was spoken as far west as the Taymyr Peninsula in the 17th century, and that the former domains of Chukchi and Koryak extended much farther to the west. Little is known about the prehistory of Nivkh, but it may be assumed that this language was also originally centred farther to the west, perhaps in Manchuria. As far as can be determined with the help of the methods of comparative linguistics, however, the four present-day Paleo-Siberian groups never formed a single family of languages in the accepted sense of that term. In fact, they may represent only a fragment of a possibly greater diversity of language families in prehistoric Siberia. Many of the languages spoken in the area during earlier periods may have been swallowed up by the more recent as well as more culturally vigorous intruders in Siberia that are now the neighbours of the Paleo-Siberian enclaves; this includes primarily the Sakha (whose domains stretch as far as the Chukchi and Yukaghir areas) and also various Tungus tribes (one or another of which borders on each of the Paleo-Siberian languages).
The Paleo-Siberian languages and other language families
Many attempts have been made to show that the four Paleo-Siberian families are related either to each other or to adjacent (or more distant) language families. Thus, Ket has been compared with the Sino-Tibetan family (which includes Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages) and with some of the languages of the Caucasus, and Yukaghir has been compared with Uralic. Some of these comparisons (e.g., the comparisons of Ket with Caucasian languages) are fanciful experiments or completely unfounded. Even more sober efforts to demonstrate ties with other languages are seriously hampered by many millennia of separation from possible related languages. The systematic reconstruction of protolanguages, often assumed as a standard for relationship among the better-established language families, is not available. Of attempts to find relatives for the four Paleo-Siberian families, only a Uralo-Yukaghir relationship has been positively received. The remaining Paleo-Siberian families, including Luorawetlan as a family in its own right, must continue to be regarded as isolates, unrelated to any known language. Although numerous resemblances in grammatical or phonological traits may be observed between Paleo-Siberian and adjacent languages (such as between Chukchi and Yupik, between Samoyed and Yukaghir, or between Nivkh and Korean or Japanese), these are not indexes of genetic affinity but are often the result of the diffusion of linguistic traits over large geographic areas. They may, however, provide clues to the linguistic prehistory of Siberia.
The cultures of the Paleo-Siberian groups are similar in that they are all Arctic or subarctic. Each particular group, however, has its own characteristic cultural profile. These characteristics may on occasion very closely resemble the cultural profile of a non-Paleo-Siberian group; e.g., Ket culture resembles Selkup culture (the Selkup language is classified as Uralic) more closely than it resembles that of any Paleo-Siberian group, evidently because Selkup- and Ket-speaking groups are located in contiguous areas.
Typical phonological features of the Paleo-Siberian languages are postvelar consonants (i.e., sounds that are formed farther back in the mouth than /k/ and usually represented as q), vowel harmony of various kinds (e.g., the alternation of e and i in the form for ‘my’ in Nivkh ñe-řla ‘my harpoon’ and ñi-řly ‘my sky’), consonant alternations (e.g., the alternation between b, v, and f in Nivkh bal ‘mountain,’ ñ-val ‘my mountain,’ c-fal ‘your mountain’), and rich consonant clusters in all but Yukaghir, but especially in Nivkh (e.g., South Sakhalin Nivkh tfyfř ‘hammer’) and Itelmen (e.g., ktxam ‘bone’).