Yupik (Eskimo) Periodic Tables (Russia and USA)

The Naukan language, its geographie and linguistic position

Naukan Yupik Eskimo is the language of no more than 50 speakers living mostly in Lavrentiya in Siberia but whose original home is the village of Naukan at East Cape, Siberia (Figure l)1. Despite the small size of the Naukan group, the lexicon of this language was first documented quite early, as western Eskimo languages go, one word in 1732, and a whole list of 277 words in Robeck (1791) (Figure 2). We shall not go into the history of the early documentation of the language here as that is well covered in Michael Krauss's introduction to the Naukan dictionary recently published by the

Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (see Dobrieva et al. 2004). Instead, we shall summarize the history of the new Naukan dictionary itself, and discuss how it is that a dictionary of a language spoken only in Siberia could be composed and written mostly in Alaska, by an international group of compilers: a native Naukan speaker from Lavrentiya, a Russian linguist from St. Petersburg, and two American linguists from Fairbanks. Though spoken only in Siberia, Naukan is linguistically intermediate between two languages that are spoken in Alaska: (Central) Siberian Yupik Eskimo, the language of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, and of the area of the Siberian coast directly to the west, and Central (Alaskan) Yup'ik Eskimo, spoken in southwestern Alaska only. The reason that Naukan—quite a distance to the north of both Central Yup'ik and Siberian Yupik—is intermediate is that the connection between Siberian Yupik and Central Alaskan Yup'ik undoubtedly went in a northern arc through East Cape, across the Bering Strait and the Seward Peninsula, not, as one might first think, directly across the open ocean between St. Lawrence Island and the southwestern Alaskan coast, which might be an area with no land barrier, but with quite a substantial sea barrier, not aboriginally navigable. Whether Naukan is linguistically closer to Siberian Yupik or to Central Alaskan Yup'ik, or is a third branch precisely midway between the two, and whether Naukan is at heart a Siberian language or an Alaskan language, and where exactly it arose, are questions which will be left to Krauss's introduction to the Naukan dictionary. He has marshalled some impressive evidence to place Naukan in the Alaskan camp coming to East Cape perhaps by way of King Island. ...more

The Alutiiq language (also called Sugpiak, Sugpiaq, Pacific Gulf Yupik, Chugach, Koniag-Chugach, Suk, Sugcestun) is a close relative to the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language spoken in the western and southwestern Alaska, but is considered a distinct language. It has two major dialects:

About 400 of the Alutiiq population of 3,000 speak the Alutiiq language. Alutiiq communities are currently in the process of revitalizing their language. In 2010 the high school in Kodiak responded to requests from students and agreed to teach the Alutiiq language. The Kodiak dialect of the language was only spoken by about 50 persons, all of them elderly, and the dialect was in danger of being lost entirely.