Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A member of a traditionally nomadic people of eastern Siberia, known for their animistic beliefs and practice of shamanism.
  • noun The language of the Yukaghirs, perhaps related to Uralic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun A language family consisting of two closely related languages spoken in Siberia.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Russian Yukagir.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word Yukaghir.

Examples

  • They and the other native people of the Yakut Arctic — the Yukaghir and the Eveny and Evenki reindeer herders — have powerful shamans, although only a handful are left.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • The Yakut, or Sakha, were mounted warriors who arrived a few centuries before the Cossacks and conquered the reindeer herders and the Yukaghir, and were in turn subjugated by the Cossacks.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • “Every year the pasture for the wild reindeer, which the Yukaghir hunt, is getting less and less because the taiga is coming up from the south,” Shadrin goes on.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • Cleaning and preparing fish for drying in the Yukaghir village of Nelemnoye, in the Verkhnekolymskiy region.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • The Yukaghir are one of the oldest aboriginal peoples of Siberia.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • Vyacheslav Shadrin, the head of the council of Yukaghir elders, tells me that in the Upper Kolyma basin, 700 miles north of Yakutsk, where he is from, last November and December, when it is normally minus 40 degrees Celsius (also Fahrenheit — Celsius and Fahrenheit converge at 40 below), it rained.

    The Arctic Oil Rush Shoumatoff, Alex 2008

  • Cyrillic based alphabets were created for languages that had been unwritten or were maybe poorly written in Arabic like Abkhazian, Chechen, Tate, Yakut, Yukaghir and Chukchi.

    languagehat.com: MINORITY LANGUAGES OF RUSSIA. 2005

  • It was originally thought that the Paleo-Siberian languages Koryak, Yukaghir and Chukchi might be closely related to many of the American Indian languages.

    languagehat.com: MINORITY LANGUAGES OF RUSSIA. 2005

  • Cyrillic based alphabets were created for languages that had been unwritten or were maybe poorly written in Arabic like Abkhazian, Chechen, Tate, Yakut, Yukaghir and Chukchi.

    languagehat.com: WHEN A LANGUAGE DIES. 2005

  • For example, Chukchi is an early cousin of Eskimo and Aleut (which appear to have links to both Ural-Altaic and Indo-European) while Yukaghir turns out to be a distant relative of Hungarian and Finnish (Uralic), ditto Koryak.

    languagehat.com: MINORITY LANGUAGES OF RUSSIA. 2005

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.