Native to Russia | ISO 639-3 yux | |
Region Yakutia and Magadan Oblast Ethnicity 1,600 all Yukaghir people (2010 census) Native speakers 370 all Yukaghir (2010 census) Language family Yukaghir
Southern Yukaghir | ||
The Southern, Kolyma or Forest Yukaghir language is one of only two Yukaghir languages.
Contents
Last spoken in the forest zone near the sources of the Kolyma, divided between the Sakha Republic and the Magadan Oblast (around 65°N 153°E), previously in the wider area of the upper Kolyma region.
Classification and grammatical features
The relationship of the Yukaghir languages with other language families is uncertain, though it has been suggested that they are distantly related to the Uralic languages, thus forming the putative Uralic–Yukaghir language family.
Kolyma and Tundra Yukaghir are the only two remnants of what used to be one of the dominant languages/language families of northeastern Siberia, spreading from the River Anadyr in the east to the River Lena in the west. On the basis of the evidence of early sources, it can be assumed that there existed a Yukaghir dialect continuum, with what is today Kolyma Yukaghir and Tundra Yukaghir at the extremes.
Kolyma Yukaghir and Tundra Yukaghir are not mutually intelligible. Kolyma Yukaghir has residual vowel harmony and a complex phonotactics of consonants, rich agglutinative morphology and is strictly head-final. It has practically no finite subordination and very few coordinate structures. Kolyma Yukaghir has a split intransitive alignment system based on discourse-pragmatic features. In absence of narrow focus, the system is organised on a nominative–accusative basis; when focused, direct objects and subjects of intransitive verbs are co-aligned (special focus case, special focus agreement).
Phonology
Other phonemes (not listed) are written the same as in Russian. Long vowels are written as digraphs: аа, ии, оо, уу, (э)
Sample
An interlinear glossed sample:
Recorded by Ljudmila Zhukova from Ljubov' Demina in 1988.[1]
"From the bottom of the mountains, from the whiteness of the ice our mother Yarqadan quietly carries its shining water downstream."