Yukaghir
Sign in to savesmall family of two closely related languages – Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir – spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River
Key facts
- Geographic distribution
- Russian Far East
- Ethnicity
- Yukaghirs , Chuvans , Anauls
- Native speakers
- 516 (mostly Tundra, 2020 census)
- Linguistic classification
- One of the world's primary language families
- Subdivisions
- Northern Omok † Chuvan † Southern
- Glottolog
- yuka1259
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
The Yukaghir languages (/ˈjuːkəɡɪər/ YOO-kə-geer or /juːkəˈɡɪər/ yoo-kə-GEER; also Yukagir, Jukagir) are a small family of two closely related surviving languages—Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir—spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River. At the 2002 Russian census, both Yukaghir languages taken together had 604 speakers. More recent reports from the field reveal that this number is far too high: Southern Yukaghir was reported to have had a maximum of 60 fluent speakers in 2009, while the Tundra Yukaghir language had around 60–70. The entire family, as such, is regarded as moribund. The Yukaghir have experienced a politically imposed language shift in recent times, resulting in a majority of speakers also speaking Russian and Yakut.
In the 2020–2021 Russian census, 516 people reported speaking a Yukaghir language as their native language.