Indigenous Languages of Siberia: An Overview

Oct 9, 2014 by

Indigenous Languages of Siberia: An Overview

[This post was originally published in March 2012] On the map of the 6,909 living languages listed in the Ethnologue database (see map on the left), Siberia is mostly empty, with fewer dots than European Russia or the United States....

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“The Tree of Life”, 25th Annual Festival of Veps Cutlure

Oct 9, 2014 by

“The Tree of Life”, 25th Annual Festival of Veps Cutlure

[This post was originally published in July 2012] The 25th annual festival of Veps culture “The Tree of Life” took place in the first weekend of July 2012, in the village of Shyoltozero in Karelia, on the shores of Lake Onega. The...

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The Profound Vepsian Influences on Russian Culture and Language

Jul 6, 2014 by

The Profound Vepsian Influences on Russian Culture and Language

[This post was originally published on GeoCurrents in July 2012] The Veps are an 8,000-strong Finnic-speaking group that lives in small pockets on the western shores of Lake Onega and in northeastern Leningrad oblast (see the...

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Agglutinative folk?

Jun 3, 2014 by

Agglutinative folk?

Several nationalistic YouTube videos, chiefly from “Hungarian History Productions”, speak of Ural-Altaic peoples or civilizations as “agglutinative folk” (see, for example, here and here). However, a correlation between Ural-Altaic...

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Altaic family: introducing Mongolian and Tungusic languages

Feb 16, 2011 by

In several recent postings, I’ve given some attention to Turkic languages. As I’ve mentioned before, some scholars believe that Turkic languages are part of a larger language family called “Altaic”. Fig.1: The...

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