| Summary: | A striking peculiarity in the historical development of Northern Samoyedic were the never-ending contacts between various groups and thus a dialect continuum spanning their languages. This paper aims at contributing to the solid establishment of this historical scenario by summarizing geographic evidence from the last 400 years, sociolinguistic evidence from the last 200 years, evidence from unpublished manuscripts based on Samoyedic linguistic data from the 18th and 19th centuries, and evidence from the history of reindeer herding in Western Siberia. Different types of data are integrated into a single history of Northern Samoyedic speakers, drawn here with more details than ever before.
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