Samoyedic Languages - Geographical Distribution

Geographical Distribution

At present, 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 Komi to the south, but they are cut off from the Baltic Finns by the Russians in the west. To the east traditionally dwell the northern Turkic Sakha. A substantial Samoyed city grew up at Mangazeya in 16th century as a trade city, but was destroyed at the beginning of the 17th century.

The Southern Samoyedic languages historically ranged across a wide territory in central Siberia, extending from the basin of the Ob River in the west to the Sayan-Baikal uplands in the east. Of these languages, only the Selkup language has survived to the present day.

Read more about this topic:  Samoyedic Languages

Famous quotes containing the words geographical and/or distribution:

    Men’s private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world’s seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.
    Faith Baldwin (1893–1978)

    The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)