Demographics of Siberia - Ethnicities and Languages

Ethnicities and Languages

Most non-Slavic groups are Turkic. Smaller linguistic groups are Mongols (ca. 600,000 speakers) Uralic (Samoyedic, Ugric; roughly 100,000 speakers), Manchu-Tungus (ca. 40,000 speakers), Chukotko-Kamchatkan (ca. 25,000 speakers), Eskimo–Aleut (some 2,000 speakers), the Yukaghir languages (highly endangered), and languages isolates Ket (but see below) and Nivkh.

Mongolian, Turkic and Manchu-Tungus languages are sometimes taken together under the term Altaic. At one time Uralic and Altaic were believed to form the Ural–Altaic group, though this theory has now been largely discarded. The proposed Uralo-Siberian family combines the Uralic family with the Yukaghir languages, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo–Aleut. These are more umbrella terms than accepted linguistic relationships. Ket has recently been linked with the Na-Dene languages into a Dené–Yeniseian group; while not universally accepted a broad consensus in favor of the proposal has emerged.