Uralic–Yukaghir languages
| Uralic–Yukaghir | |
|---|---|
| (controversial) | |
| Geographic distribution |
Scandinavia, Siberia, Eastern Europe |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-Uralic ? |
| Subdivisions | |
| Glottolog | None |
|
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Uralic–Yukaghir is a proposed language family composed of Uralic and Yukaghir. It is also known as Uralo-Yukaghir.
Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Among the better-known Uralic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.
Yukaghir is a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia. It formerly extended over a much wider area (Collinder 1965:30). It consists of two languages, Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir.
The idea that the Uralic and Yukaghir languages are related is not new. It was advanced in passing by Holger Pedersen in his 1931 book Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (p. 338). Pedersen included both languages in his proposed Nostratic language family (ib.).
A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was argued for in Jukagirisch und Uralisch ('Yukaghir and Uralic'), a 1940 work by Björn Collinder, one of the leading Uralic specialists of the 20th century (Greenberg 2005:124). Collinder was inspired by a 1907 article by Heikki Paasonen, which pointed to similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir, though it did not identify the two languages as genetically related (Greenberg, ib.).
Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen (1987).
Uralic and Yukaghir are listed as a language family, forming a subgroup of a higher-order family called "Eurasiatic", in Joseph Greenberg's Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives (2000–2002). However, Greenberg did not present a discursive argument for this subgroup, presumably leaving it to the reader to work it out from the data on grammar and vocabulary he presented.
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