Samoyedic languages

The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30,000 speakers altogether.

Together with the Finno-Ugric languages they form the Uralic branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic phylum. Nowadays the unity of Ural-Altaic is doubted.

The language and respective ethnic groups include:

• Nenets,
• Yenets or Enets, the tribe by Yenisei River,
• Nganasan or Tavgi,
• Selkup, also called Ostyak Samoyeds; the name can cause certain confusion, because some observers labelled the Khants with the name Ostyaks,
• Kama Samoyeds (extinct).

The first three are mutually intelligible, Selkup being more divergent.

Samoyed territory extends from the White Sea to the Laptev Sea, along the Arctic shores of European Russia, including southern Novaya Zemlya, the Yamal Peninsula, the mouths of the Ob and the Yenisei and into the Taimyr peninsula in northernmost Siberia. Their economy is based on reindeer herding. They are contiguous with the trans-Ural Ugric speakers and the cis-Ural Permic Finns to the south, but they are cut off from the Baltic Finns by the Russians in the west and, in the east, by the north Turkic Yakut from the Yukaghir. A substantial Samoyed city grew up at Mangazeya in 16th century as a trade city, to be destroyed at the beginning of the 17th century.