The Isolated Russian Dialectal System in Contact with Tungus Languages in Siberia and the Far East

Abstract

The language varieties we are presenting here have their historical origin in a migration process taking place in the early 17th century. From that time on these language communities have been isolated from the Russian homeland, but in intense contact with several non-Russian languages, mainly Even. Before the linguistic facts (mostly phonemic) are presented indicating far-reaching contact between Russian and Tungus languages, a short overview of the present situation shall be given, restricted to the following information: