The Village Where Siberia Speaks to Alaska

Somewhere in central Siberia, there is a language that Navajo and Apache people hear, and they catch something of their own in it. Scientists fly to Alaska because of it. Linguists have argued about it for years.

The language is called Ket. It lives in a village called Kellog.

Picture the place. A settlement in the taiga, on a left tributary of the Yenisei, one of Siberia's great rivers. About three hundred people. Wooden houses. Boats pulled up at the water's edge. And a little way off, the bare frame of a chum, the traditional tent. This is the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk region. The people here are the Kets, one of the smallest peoples in Siberia. Linguists call their language perhaps the biggest surprise of the last twenty years.

It's easy to think a small Siberian language is just one of many. So why would researchers cross an ocean for it?

Start with how alone it is. Ket is the only living language of the Yeniseian family. Its relatives were Yugh, Kott, Arin and Pumpokol. They have all vanished. Ket has about fifty speakers, almost all of them elderly. A third of all Kets live in Kellog, and it is the one place on Earth where Ket is still taught in a school.

The language is unusual even by Siberian standards. Tone changes meaning, as in Chinese. The same sounds, said a little higher or a little lower, make a different word. And the verb is built to carry a whole sentence in one piece: who, what, to whom, where, when. Next to it, Russian sounds almost blunt. The name of the people, Ket, simply means "person."

In the nineteen nineties, an American linguist took this language seriously. His name is Edward Vajda, from Western Washington University. He began by catching Ket words from emigrants in Germany. Then he made his way to Tomsk. In August of two thousand eight, he finally reached Kellog. It took seven flights, three trains, a helicopter, and a landing on a gravel strip in the taiga. In the old people's homes, he drank coffee and went over verbs, hour after hour.

He wasn't hunting for vocabulary. He was comparing the machinery of the verb. The order of the prefixes. The markers of person. The traces of very old sounds. And it fit. The Ket verb and the verb of the Na-Dene languages are built to one blueprint. Na-Dene is the family of Indigenous languages of Alaska and western North America. It includes Tlingit, Eyak, Navajo and Apache.

Also in two thousand eight, the University of Alaska in Fairbanks held the first symposium on the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis. Linguists sat in the hall, and so did elders of Indigenous nations. Vajda showed his tables. A Ket prefix sits in the same slot as a Navajo prefix. The Ket marker of the past tense sounds close to the Athabaskan one. After the talk, one elderly Athabaskan man said to him, quietly: so somewhere over the ocean, we have cousins.

The cautious version goes like this. About fifteen thousand years ago, somewhere deep in Asia, there lived a people who spoke one language. Some of them crossed Beringia into America and became the ancestors of Na-Dene. Others stayed in Siberia and slowly drifted toward the Yenisei. Millennia passed. And the shared skeleton of the verb survived on both sides.

Not everyone accepts it. Some linguists call it the most convincing evidence yet of a link across the Bering Strait. Others say there are too few matches, and they could be chance. The argument is still open.

In Kellog, all of that feels far away. People still fish on the Yelogui. They heat their houses with stoves. They teach grandchildren a few Ket words, as many as the children remember. The old people are leaving, and with each one goes a piece of a language that may have family at the other end of the world.

Sometimes it seems that one of the biggest linguistic discoveries of recent decades is quietly living out its days in a taiga village. You get there by helicopter, or in summer by motorboat, on high water.

If you leave with more questions than you came with, that was the idea. The answers and the map live at moygid dot online.