Previously, we have looked at the language predominantly used in the settlement of Uelen, where most of its population being Chukchi. Today, we will look at the language used by its other indigenous people group, the Yupik.

We commonly associate the Yupik with Alaska and Yukon, but there are a few hundred Yupik living in the northeastern reaches of Russia as well. In fact, the former title of Asia’s easternmost settlement shares the same name with the language and people group that once lived there. That is, Naukan Yupik.

Naukan draws its name from the Yupik language, to mean Soddy, or a sod house. These are shelters built from sod, or a type of prairie grass. Being located far up north, and having an Arctic tundra climate, standard traditional building materials like stone and wood would be extremely difficult to obtain, and hence using sod would have been the first settlers’ most accessible building material. However, the indigenous Yupik people were fully evicted from this village of Naukan by 1958, with some of them moving to Lavrentiya to the south, and some moving to Uelen, where around 70 live to this day.

The Naukan Yupik language today is spoken by a few dozen people. Some say it is critically endangered, while others say it is moribund. And unlike languages like Chukchi and Sakha, Naukan Yupik is not taught in schools, and so its transmission and use is largely confined to family and everyday communication, putting it at a great risk of extinction as speakers gravitate to Russian for education and many other uses.

When classifying this language, Jacobson remarked it as being an intermediate between Central Siberian Yupik spoken in Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island and Central Alaskan Yupik spoken in southwestern Alaska. Traditionally, these Yupik languages were thought to be dialects of a single Yupik language, as they generally share a lot of similarities with one another in their lexicon and their grammatical structures.

However, what they do differ in is their phonology. While Naukan Yupik has 4 vowel phonemes (/i/, /ɨ/, /u/, /a/) like the other Yupik languages, Naukan Yupik has 19 consonants, in contrast to Central Yupik, which has 25. Additionally, while the schwa is used in other Yupik languages, in Naukan Yupik, it seems to be realised as a upper-central vowel instead.

Like Chukchi we explored previously, Naukan Yupik follows an ergative-absolutive alignment system. To refresh your memory on what it is, you could refer to the section in the essay on Chukchi. And like other Eskaleut languages, Naukan Yupik is polysynthetic; it synthesises a wealth of affixes with a certain root word to create what is technically a compound or complex word, but carries a meaning of an entire clause or sentence. With the way suffixation happens in Naukan Yupik, word order is generally rather flexible. However, some simpler clauses might just tend towards a subject-verb-object word order.

Menovshchikov mentioned a total of 7 grammatical cases in Naukan Yupik, which is consistent with the other Yupik languages. However, instead of an ergative case, the Yupik languages use a relative case. This is because the Yupik languages combine the genitive and the ergative into one single case, with the former carrying the function of denoting possessor relationships. For example, if one wants to express “Aran’s spear” in Naukan Yupik, both words will be marked, with Aran carrying the absolutive case, and the spear carrying the relative case. This would be realised as:

arat-ɨ-m pana-ŋ-a

Aran-ABS spear-ERG

Interestingly, documentation of the Naukan Yupik language goes really far back, with word lists being compiled as early as 1791 by Robeck. While not all of these words are used today compared to centuries back, it offers a glimpse into changes in the lexicon of the language, something that is very rare to see in languages as obscure as this.

However, some issues in transcribing Naukan Yupik words arise, such as the orthographical rules which are followed by the respective wordlists compiled. Robeck would have used an 18th century German system of transcription, which would be different from a transcription by a Russian ethnologist or a linguist. Vowel lengths might also be difficult to precisely determine, as vowels could also be lengthened by prosody, in other words, the patterns of stress and intonation when Naukan Yupik is spoken. This difficulty has been noted by Jacobson when proposing a dictionary for another Yupik language.

Reading up on this language mainly took me to sources authored by Steven A. Jacobson, who specialises in studying the Yupik languages. Resources in English seemed pretty scarce, and so, I consulted some resources in Russian as well. And even so, the main reference grammar I could find is a publication by Menovshchikov in 1975, which is accessible by a few shady links I am unsure of clicking. But there is a rather rich text list of Naukan Yupik compiled by E. S. Rubtsovoy, in Russian, which I will link in Further Reading below. Lastly, there is a small compilation of Naukan Yupik resources on the Open Language Archives Community, which you can find here. With relatively scant resources, even in comparison to Chukchi, more effort should be made to document Naukan Yupik, including its sounds and syntax, such that revitalisation efforts could start to take root.

Further Reading

Jacobson, S. A. (2005). History of the Naukan Yupik Eskimo dictionary with implications for a future Siberian Yupik dictionary. Études/Inuit/Studies, 29(1/2), 149–161. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42870434.

Тексты на языках эскимосов Чукотки в записи Е. С. Рубцовой / Подгот. к печати и ред. Н. Б. Вахтина. СПб.: Арт-Экспресс, 2019. — 868 с. https://nenadict.iling.spb.ru/publications/2660.