! ! Ket Its Viability and Revival Prospects Ket Family. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:35-keti.jpg Kevin Andrusky LING 324 Final Project December 09, 2013 LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET !1 Ket Its Viability and Revival Prospects ! In 2009, a very important collection of linguistic articles was published by the University of Alaska. Entitled The Dene-Yeniseian Connection, the collection purported to show a connection between the Yeniseian languages of Siberia and the Na-Dené languages of North America. While not all linguists have accepted the connection, it is generally accepted among people who study those languages. With this work, the first real linguistic connection between the Old World and the New had been shown, giving further evidence to the widely-held belief that the indigenous peoples of North and South America had migrated to the New World across a land- bridge that formed in the present-day Bering Strait during an ice age. One of the Yeniseian languages that was used to demonstrate this connection was Ket. Ket is, in fact, the only Yeniseian language that has survived to this day. Ket has many features that make it rather different from its neighbours, and even from languages the world over. The Ket people were very different from other peoples of Asia, maintaining a hunter-gatherer lifestyle up until contact with Russians in the 17th century. They had well-developed Shamanistic practices which were tightly integrated with their language. Russian contact proved disastrous for the Kets, and their lifestyles, and later their language, suffered for it. Today, the Ket language is spoken by only a handful of elderly Kets. This paper aims to show three things, the state of the Ket language and the Ket people, the causes of language shift to Russian among the Ket population, and the reasons that Ket is a language worth the time and attention of linguists. The paper concludes with a discussion of the prognosis for the viability of LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET !2 Ket, and an overview of the interview the author conducted with Dr. Edward Vajda, a leading researcher into the Ket language and people. ! The Ket Language The Ket language is one of several Yeniseian languages which were found along the middle stretches of the Yenisei River in Siberia (Vajda, 1998). Of the Yeniseian languages, only Ket has survived to today, the other members of the Yeniseian family losing their last speakers in the 20th century. As of 1998, Ket was still being learned as a native language in three communities along the Yenisei: Kéllog, Surgúitikha and Madúika (Vajda, 1998). Currently there are three dialects of Ket, southern, central and northern, centred around the villages mentioned above (Vajda, 1998). In 1968, Soviet researchers recognized two dialects, Sym (with very few speakers already left in 1968) and Imbat. Imbat was recognized as having three sub-dialects which differed mainly based on phonology (Vahtre & Viikberg, 1991). The author could not find any resource that linked those three sub-dialects of Imbat to the three current dialects of Ket, so the relationship between the dialects of 1968 and present-day dialects is unknown. The Soviet Union, in 1929, adopted a Latin-based alphabet, called the Unified Northern Alphabet, for the purposes of providing alphabets to the many majority languages of Russia (Grenoble, 2003). Development of the alphabet for Ket, however, stopped only a few years after that (Grenoble, 2003) amid the Soviet upheavals and purges of 1937 (Georg, 2007). The original, non-Russian-language friendly policies were part of Lenin’s New Economic Plan (Schiffman, 2002). Russification, starting in 1938, was partly enacted in response to threats of war with Germany (Schiffman, 2002). In the time that the alphabet was used, a school primer was published for Ket (Georg, 2007) - for almost 60 years this was the only material available for LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET !3 instruction in Ket. A new alphabet, based on the Cyrillic alphabet, was created at the end of the 1980s (Grenoble, 2003), and more school materials began to be published using it. These included a Russian-Ket dictionary (Verner, 1993) and three grades worth of primers (Verner & Nikoleava, 1991; Verner & Nikoleava, 1993; Verner, 1995). The primers are printed by the government of Russia, and are provided free of charge to Ket schools. In these books, Russian is used at the metalanguage in supplements at the end of the publication (Ivanov, 1993). A fourth- grade text is also available (Kazakevich, 2005). The first Ket grammar was published in Russian in 1934. In 1968 a newer Russian- language grammar was released (Vahtre & Viikberg, 1991). In 2004, Vajda published the first exhaustive grammar of the Ket language in English (Vajda, 2004). A second English-language grammar, with more detail and commentary was published in 2007 (Georg, 2007). In 2001, an annotated bibliography of all research on Ket (including all research not in English) was published (Vajda, 2001). A significant amount of material on Ket is now available in English. A large sampling of this can be found in the references section for this paper. The Ket language is rarely used these days, there are no domains in which it is the primary language. It sees most use a a language of education in Ket-language schools (Kazakevich, 2005). Soviet policy under Gorbachov liberalized attitudes towards minority languages and allowed for their use. Ket-language instruction began in some schools in the Yenisei region (Grenoble, 2003). The Ket language has no official status, is not considered a notable language of the region in which it is found, and has no national or international status at all. ! LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET !4 The Ket People Originally, in Imperial Russia, the Kets were referred to as Otsyaks (Ket people, n.d.). The word Ostyak was apparently borrowed from the Tatars and referred to any non-Turkic speaking groups in Western Siberia (Vajda, 1998). Later the term Yenisei Ostyak was used to refer to the people living along the Yenisei River, which included the Kets (Ket people, n.d.). The terms were rather ambiguous, as many unrelated groups were referred to by the same word. Also, the terms had developed negative social connotations (Vajda, 1998). In the 1930s the Soviet Union first began referring to the Kets as simply Yeniseians, then later as Kets (Vajda, 1998). The word Ket comes from the Ket language word k#$t which means “man”, “person”, or “human being”. Kets themselves use the term k%nd#&, meaning “light people”, but the Russian term 'st(k is often used in the presence of non-Kets. In Russian, Kets use the term kéty to refer to themselves (Vajda, 1998). The Kets were thought to originally be nomads from South Siberia. They were incorporated into Russia in the 17th century. Their communities were broken up and the people scattered in order to reduce resistance, and the patriarchal social system that governed their lives broke down. The Russians were primarily interested in furs - such as sable and squirrel. Kets were required to pay tribute in pelts, and found themselves at the mercy of the prices set by merchants and inflated by the presence of gold prospectors. The Kets quickly found themselves mired in huge debts that they had no hope of repaying. By the end of the 19th century, the Kets could not live without Russian support, having been devastated by European diseases and famines (Vajda, n.d.a; Vahtre & Viikberg, 1991). The Kets maintained a hunter-gatherer-fisher lifestyle through these years, however. They were one of the last groups of people to have this kind of lifestyle in Eurasia. Their way of LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET !5 gave the Russians and other researchers glimpses of how people lived before pastoralism took over, as it has throughout the rest of Europe and Asia (Vajda, 1998). The Kets maintained the language best in the areas related to these domains, and have a large collection of unique words for flora, fauna, weather, hunting, etc. (Vahtre & Viikberg, 1991). Under the Soviet Union, the Kets were collectivized. The Soviet Union recognized them as indigenous peoples but Ket traditions were suppressed and Russian lifestyles and language was imposed on them (Ket people, n.d.). One aspect of this imposition was boarding schools. Ket children were taken to boarding schools away from their families and given a modern Russian education (Vajda, personal communication). This broke down the Ket language transmission, as Ket was not allowed to be spoken in the schools under threat of punishment. While the schools were not religious in nature (the Soviet Union being officially atheistic), their practices and the outcomes on the culture and language were very similar to what happened in Canada and Australia with regards to their indigenous peoples. The Ket people had a system of Shamanistic beliefs that were well-developed and played a major role in their lifestyles up until the mid 1900s (Vajda, n.d.b; Vajda, 2010a). These beliefs were first undermined by Christian missionaries after the 17th century (Vahtre & Viikberg, 1991), and then through official Soviet policies of atheism, which were in part enforced in the boarding schools referenced above. With Ket traditional religion being replaced by other systems of (non-)belief, another domain in which the Ket language could be used was lost, and replaced with the Russian language of Russian religion. In 1926, there were 1428 Kets in the Russian census, and 85.8% of the Ket population could speak Ket (Ket people, n.d.). The numbers of Kets has stayed fairly constant over the years, in 1959 there were 1019 Kets and 77% could speak Ket natively.