Uralic–Yukaghir, also known as Uralo-Yukaghir, is a highly controversial proposed language family composed of Uralic and 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) and it consists of two surviving languages, Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir. Proponents of the Uralo-Siberian proposal include Uralo-Yukaghir as one of its two branches, alongside the Siberian languages (sometimes Nivkh, (formerly) Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut).

History

Similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir were first pointed out by Paasonen (1907) and Lewy (1928), although they did not consider these to be sufficient evidence for a genetic relationship between the two. Holger Pedersen (1931) included Uralic and Yukaghir in his proposed Nostratic language family, and also noted some similarities between them. A genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir was first argued for in detail in 1940, independently by Karl Bouda and Björn Collinder. The hypothesis was further elaborated by Collinder in subsequent publications, and also by other scholars including Harms (1977), Nikolaeva (1988) and Piispanen (2013). Uralic–Yukaghir is listed as a language family in A Guide to the World's Languages by Merritt Ruhlen (1987), and is accepted as a unit in controversial long-range proposals such as "Eurasiatic" by Joseph Greenberg (2000, 2002) and "Nostratic" by Allan Bomhard (2008), both based on evidence collected by earlier scholars like Collinder.

Proposed evidence

Collinder based his case for a genetic relationship between Uralic and Yukaghir on lexical and grammatical evidence; the latter included according to him similarities between pronouns, nominal case suffixes, and verb inflection. The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Nikolaeva (2006). The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Aikio (2019). In Yukaghir numbers also share similarities such as Proto-Uralic "ükte/*ikte" and Yukaghir "irke" 'one'.

Criticism

The Uralic–Yukaghir hypothesis is rejected by many researchers as unsupported. While most agree that there is a core of common vocabulary that cannot be simply dismissed as chance resemblances, it has been argued that these are not the result of common inheritance, but rather due to contact between Yukaghir and Uralic speakers, which resulted in borrowing of vocabulary from Uralic languages (especially Samoyedic) into Yukaghir. Rédei (1999) assembled a large corpus of what he considered as loans from Uralic into Yukaghir. Häkkinen (2012) argues that the grammatical systems show too few convincing resemblances, especially the morphology, and proposes that putative Uralic–Yukaghir cognates are in fact borrowings from an early stage of Uralic (c. 3000 BC; he dates Proto-Uralic to c. 2000 BC) into an early stage of Yukaghir, while Uralic was (according to him) spoken near the Sayan region and Yukaghir near the Upper Lena River and near Lake Baikal. Aikio (2014) agrees with Rédei and Häkkinen that Uralic–Yukaghir is unsupported and implausible, and that common vocabulary shared by the two families is best explained as the result of borrowing from Uralic into Yukaghir, although he rejects many of their (especially Rédei's) examples as spurious or accidental resemblances and puts the date of borrowing much later, arguing that the loanwords he accepts as valid were borrowed from an early stage of Samoyedic (preceding Proto-Samoyedic; thus roughly in the 1st millennium BC) into Yukaghir, in the same general region between the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal. Proponents of the theory have attempted to respond to criticisms with arguments that Uralic correspondences are found very extensively in function words and in the most used vocabulary which is allegedly very rarely borrowed. In particular, demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, numbers, kinship terms, and many verbs - these kinds of words are very rarely borrowed from other languages and are very resistant to loaning. According to Peter S. Piispanen, these proposed common words include the Yukaghir numeral "irke" 'one' compared to Proto-Uralic *ikte 'one', the first and second person singular pronouns in Proto-Yukaghir "*mət" 'I' and "*tət" 'you', compared to Proto-Uralic "*mon" 'I' and "*te/*ton" 'you' alongside the Yukaghir demonstrative pronoun root *ta- compared to the Proto-Uralic root *ta-. However, even basic vocabulary can be borrowed in cases of extensive contact.

Urheimat

According to Vladimir Napolskikh, the split between Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic branches might have occurred somewhere in the area between the Ob River and the Irtysh River, following an earlier split between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Yukaghir somewhere in Eastern Siberia.