Indigenous Peoples of Siberia - Overview

Overview

Classifying the diverse population by language, it includes speakers of the following language families (number of speakers reflect the 2002 Russian census):

• Uralic
  • Permic (about 1 million speakers)
  • Samoyedic (some 70,000 speakers)
  • Ugric (some 15,000 speakers)
• Yukaghir (nearly extinct)
• Turkic
  • Yakuts (456,288 speakers)
  • Dolgans (population: 7,261; speakers: 4,865)
  • Tuvans (population: 243,442; speakers: 242,754)
  • Tofa (population: 837; speakers: 378)
  • Khakas (population: 75,622; speakers: 52,217)
  • Shors (population: 13,975; speakers: 6,210)
  • Chulyms (population: 656; speakers: 270)
  • Altay (some 70,000 speakers)
• Mongolic (some 400,000 speakers)
• Tungusic (some 80,000 speakers)
• Yeniseian
  • Ket (some 1,400 speakers)
• Chukotko-Kamchatkan (some 25,000 speakers)
• Nivkh (some 5,000 speakers)
• Eskimo–Aleut (some 2,000 speakers)

Simplified, the indigenous peoples of Siberia listed above can be put into four groups,

1. Uralic
2. Altaic
3. Yeniseian branch of the Dené–Yeniseian languages
4. Paleosiberian ("other")

Altaic has not been proven to be a language family, a phylogenetic unit. It may be a Sprachbund. Paleosiberian is simply a geographic term of convenience. Here, these two terms are listed just to serve as portal-like starting points – without suggesting genetic considerations.