Vast cold lands Northeastern Siberia were historically inhabited by small-scale communities, tribes of nomads, fishers and hunters. This region used to be the gates for Americas’ settlement, and peoples and languages repeatedly replaced each other moving towards and backwards by Bering Strait/ land bridge and adjust seas. My area of interest are the contacts (i.a. cross-continent) of northeastern Siberian communities manifested in language features and language practices, the latter potentially explaining/supporting the former.
In this talk, I will concentrate on contact studies of two regions where I worked. One is the lowland of Kolyma river where five languages belonging to five different linguistic stocks are spoken: Tundra Yukaghir , Even, Chukchi, Yakut, and Russian. For the local communities having a command of five languages was the norm during the big part of 20th century. The second region is Chukchi Peninsula, a tiny easternmost end of Eurasia, where during the last century Chukchi, Chaplinski, Sirenik, Naukan, Inupiaq, English Hawaii pidgin, and Russian languages were spoken. Multilingualism here was a more distant and less widespread practice, which was continuously reducing during the 20th century.
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