The Dené-Yeniseian Hypothesis

• Main Author: Vajda, Edward J.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2011
• Subjects: aleut; Bering Strait; eyak; haida; inuit; Inuit–Yupik; Ket language; tlingit; Yakutat; Yupik; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0064

Dené-Yeniseian is a historical-comparative linguistic hypothesis that claims a genealogical relationship between the North American language family Na-Dené and the Yeniseian family of central Siberia. If fully demonstrated, it would constitute the first established language link between an Old World family and one spoken exclusively by peoples native to the Americas, placing it alongside the Inuit-Yupik-Aleut (Eskaleut) family, which is more obviously located on both sides of the Bering Strait. Na-Dené consists of the still widespread Athabaskan (Dené) family, which contains over forty languages; the Tlingit language of Alaska’s Panhandle; and the recently extinct Eyak, once spoken in the region of Yakutat to Cordova, Alaska. Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan are the two primary branches of this family. The inclusion of Haida in Na-Dené remains controversial, and in any event, work on the Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis has not uncovered any new potential evidence that Haida is related to Yeniseian. The Yeniseian family in the early twenty-first century is represented by the critically endangered Ket language, spoken in three closely related dialects by fewer than one hundred elderly speakers out of an estimated twelve hundred ethnic Ket people, most of whom live in small riverside villages in extremely isolated areas of Turukhansk province. The Ket and their extinct relatives—the Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol—formerly lived much farther south along the Yenisei and its tributaries, and substrate river names of Yeniseian origin suggest that these tribes once inhabited an area from north-central Mongolia westward to the Altai Mountains and north to the Angara on the southeastern tip of Lake Baikal, with hydronymic evidence of some Yeniseian dialects at least as far west as the Ob-Irtysh watershed.