UralicâÂÂYukaghir, also known as Uralo-Yukaghir, is a hypothetical 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, while 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).
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).
UralicâÂÂYukaghir 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.
Uralic-Yukaghir has been criticized by Ante Aikio (Aikio 2014), while it has been recently and heavily advocated by Peter Piispanen and Václav Blaà ¾ek (Blaà ¾ek & Piispanen 2024).
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).
The following list of lexical correspondences is taken from Piispanen (2013).
The UralicâÂÂYukaghir 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 UralicâÂÂYukaghir 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 UralicâÂÂYukaghir 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 UralicâÂÂYukaghir relationship such as Peter S. Piispanen have responded to criticisms by emphasizing that many of the proposed cognates occur in core vocabulary, particularly in function words and high-frequency terms, which are rarely borrowed between languages. He argued that, unlike typical loanword patterns observed in language contact situations (such as in Quechua, where borrowings are heavily concentrated in nouns), the UralicâÂÂYukaghir correspondences are more evenly distributed across word classes. This includes categories like demonstrative and personal pronouns, numerals, kinship terms, and basic verbsâÂÂtypes of words that are notably resistant to borrowing. Peter S. Piispanen, for example, highlights several of these shared elements: the Yukaghir numeral irke âÂÂoneâ aligns with Proto-Uralic ikte âÂÂoneâÂÂ; the Proto-Yukaghir first and second person singular pronouns mÃÂt âÂÂIâ and tÃÂt âÂÂyouâ correspond to Proto-Uralic mon âÂÂIâ and *te/ton âÂÂyouâÂÂ; and the Yukaghir demonstrative root ta- parallels the Proto-Uralic ta-. Piispanen stresses that such wide distribution of apparent cognates across grammatical categories is atypical for loanwords, believing it to support the idea of a genetic relationship rather than simple lexical borrowing.
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.