! ! 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 of 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 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 is spoken by only a handful of elderly Kets. This paper aims to show three things, the state of the Ket language and the , the causes of 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 , in 1929, adopted a Latin-based alphabet, called the Unified Northern

Alphabet, for the purposes of providing alphabets to the many majority languages of

(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 was apparently borrowed from the 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 kɛʔt which means “man”, “person”, or

“human being”. Kets themselves use the term kʌndɛŋ, meaning “light people”, but the Russian term ɔstɨk 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 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 . 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, , 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 of Russian religion.

In 1926, there were 1428 Kets in the , 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. In 1989 there were 1100

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 6 Kets and 48% of the population could speak Ket natively - at least according to Russian data

(Grenoble, 2003). These numbers may be greatly exaggerated, however, by counting people who have only a tenuous grasp of the language. Today, most speakers of the language are elderly and there is little to no intergenerational transmission of the language. Of Kets that can be considered truly fluent in their language, all are older than 60 and they compose only 5% of the population today (Vajda, personal communication).

Ivanov, however, gives a different view (Ivanov, 1993). He states that the speakers of Ket are remaining stable in number, and that this is due to the “relative self-sufficiency” of the Kets.

Given that all other resources paint the Kets as highly dependent on the outside world in modern times, the author finds it strange for Ivanov to make such a claim. Whether this view is more or less accurate than the standard view of the Ket situation could nor be determined. ! The Importance of Ket Despite seeming to be a minor language in a very remote area of the world, there are several features of the Ket language which made it a very important language to study. The grammar of Ket (and other Yeniseain languages) is very different from other languages found in the same region, or even around the world. Vajda, for example, became interested in the Ket language because of two unsolved problems within it: its verb structure and the nature of its tones (Vajda, personal communication; Vajda, n.d.c.; Vajda, 2008; Tuite, Holisky & Aronson

2003). The Ket language, unlike its neighbours, lacks synharmony, is tonal, uses ablaut for grammatical purposes, has a noun “gender” division of living and non-living and has very complex polysynthetic verbs (Vajda, 1998). Ket also features double marking of the grammatical subject, which is a feature not found in any other language group (Vajda, 1998). In addition, Ket

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 7 has a large amount of incorporation, allowing for incorporation of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (Ket language, n.d.).

These novelties of the language led many people to the immediate question of to what other languages the Yeniseian languages might be connected. Proposals of language connections include the language families Sino-Tibetan (Sedlacek, 2008), Na-Dené, North Caucasic, and the language from northern Pakistan (Vajda, 1998). Except for the connection with Na-

Dené (discussed below), none of these connections have significant support.

However, recently, a strong linguistic connection to the Na-Dené languages has been shown (Vajda, 2009). Alongside this, biological genetic connections have been shown between the Ket people and the Dené peoples of North America (Scott & O’Rourke, 2009) and many connections in terms of kinship terms (Ives, Rice and Vajda, 2009) and mythologies (Kim-

Moloney, 2009) have been shown. While not all linguists accept this connection (Ket language, n.d.), it has strong support among the academic community. Without Ket, and the research that has been done on it by Russian and Soviet linguists, and recently by foreign linguists, this connection between the Old World and the New World might never have been found.

In addition to the linguistic properties that make Ket an interesting language to study, and which have filled many papers in both Russian and English, Ket is the sole remaining language in the only Old World to have a well-supported connection to the New World.

This makes it, in the author’s opinion, one of the most important languages in the world. !

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 8 Modern-day Linguistic Ecology of Ket and Ket’s Viability As noted above, the Ket language is in a very precarious state. Intergenerational transmission has been broken and the language is confined to only some elderly speakers. Vajda is convinced that there is no hope of saving the language. The Russian government has put a lot of effort into helping the Ket situation out - developing learning materials and funding Ket- language education in a few Ket villages. The Kets are very poor and alcoholism is rampant among the population. Even though there are Ket-language schools and teaching materials in

Ket, the economic and social problems of the Ket population are creating immense pressure on the people leaving little time for pursuits such as language revitalization. In addition, there are infrastructure problems that make it difficult to reach the Kets, and even with the best intentions of the Russian government to help the language, the people are just too remote to be adequately assisted (Vajda, personal communication).

Vajda asserted, “There is no practical possibility of [reviving the Ket language]” (Vajda, personal communication). Given that he is one of the foremost authorities on Ket, and has visited Ket populations in Russia, it is incredibly sobering to hear that he believes there is no chance to save the language.

While the author would be happier with a better prognosis for the language, it is probably best to defer to the experts. Vajda has noted that he believes that many languages can be revitalized, given the will of the people and the availability of resources (Vajda, personal communication) - he just doesn’t believe those conditions are present for Ket. However, we can take an amount of solace in the fact that Ket is a very well-documented language, complete with primers, grammars and dictionaries. The language will not be lost completely. Further, should the situation of the Kets improve, they may have greater interest in reviving their language, as

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 9 has happened elsewhere in the world - such as in Cornwall. If that desire does surface, the Kets are well-served by a huge body of documentation to aid them in the revival of their language. ! Interview For the purposes of the paper, it seemed impractical to actually interview a member of the Ket community. As noted above, Ket speakers live in such remote regions of Russia that even

Russian authorities have trouble reaching. Vajda and several other researchers have taken long trips into the region to talk to speakers of the language, because there are few other ways to do it.

In addition, any Ket speaker is likely to also speak Russian, but not English. All of these factors together make the likelihood of finding a native Ket speaker to interview very low.

The author instead interviewed Dr. Edward Vajda, a leading authority on Ket. He has been working on the Ket language for years. He was initially attracted to the language because of certain unexplained grammatical features, and because the linguistic connections between Ket

(and the other Yeniseian languages) and the languages of the world was unknown. The fact that he was fluent and literate in Russian helped him immensely, as there is a large amount of documentation on the language available in Russian.

The interview was conducted by e-mail over the course of several weeks. The author started off with some general questions and then took them into different areas to explore. The initial proposed set of questions quickly were thrown to the side, as they had to do with how the language would be revitalized and it was quickly obvious that Vajda had no hopes of Ket ever improving its situation and believed it was only a matter of time until that last speaker passed away without transmitting the language to someone else. Instead, the author used the interview

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 10 to clear up some points in the research that were unclear or possibly even untrue. It was also used to probe Vajda’s feelings about language revitalization in general. ! Conclusion The Ket language is, in the author’s opinion, one of the most interesting languages on the planet. It has very unique grammatical features which have intrigued linguists for over a century, and seems to show relations to many languages in far-flung regions of the world, including North

America, Tibet and the Caucasus. Although only one of those connections has been satisfactorily proven, that connection is by far the most important. With Ket (and other extinct

Yeniseian languages) we have strong proof of a linguistic connection between the Old and New worlds. Biological connections had been shown in the past, but never had languages of the Old

World been connected to the new.

Unfortunately, like many indigenous languages, Ket was overrun by a larger culture. In this case the Russians. The Ket people were devastated by famine and disease, fell into deep debts, found their religion under siege, and eventually, under Soviet collectivization, found their traditional lifestyles destroyed. The Soviet Union enforced Russification policies, including forced boarding of Ket children, which put further pressure on the language. Under Gorbachov and then under the Russian Federation, more liberal policies took over and the government became involved in maintaining and revitalizing Ket. However, the Kets are some of the most remote people in the world, and suffer from many social issues, most notably alcoholism. The result is that there are no native speakers of the Ket language under the age of 60, and only 5% of the

Ket population has any real fluency in the language. Ket language schools are ineffective at producing native Ket speakers.

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 11 It seems likely that there is little hope of revitalizing the Ket language. Even with government interest, the local population has much greater problems than revitalizing a language and when the current speakers of the language die off, the language will cease to be spoken.

Perhaps when the situation of the Kets improves, the Ket population will find an interest in the language again, and a revival program will be undertaken. Here, the Kets are fortunate as a significant amount of material is available on their language, which would make revival easier than if the language had been lost without all the work that Russian and foreign researchers have put into the language.

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 12 Maps ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Yeniseian Language Distribution. Ket is found in the north most half of the shaded area.

From: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Yeniseian_map_XVII-XX.png/300px- Yeniseian_map_XVII-XX.png. Accessed Dec 8, 2013.

LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 13 Distribution of Yeniseian Languages in Siberia and northern Na-Dené languages in North America. Additional Dené languages, such a Navajo are found further south in North America.

From: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7360/images/476291a-f1.2.jpg. Accessed on December 8, 2013.

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LING 324 ANDRUSKY KET 17