Kamassian or Kamas is an extinct Samoyedic language, included in the Southern group together with Mator and Selkup. The last native speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989. Kamassian was spoken in Russia, east of the Ural mountains, by Kamasins.
A historical name for Kamas is Koibal. This is the term for the Kamas people who shifted to the Turkic Khakas language; the modern Koibal people are mixed Samoyed–Khakas.
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)