Nivkh language

Nivkh or Gilyak /ˈɡɪljæk/ (self-designation: Нивхгу диф Nivkhgu dif) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun (a tributary of the Amur), along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. "Gilyak" is the Manchu appellation. Its speakers are known as the Nivkh people.

The population of ethnic Nivkhs has been reasonably stable over the past century, with 4,549 Nivkhs counted in 1897, and 4,673 in 1989. However, the number of native speakers of the Nivkh language among these has dropped from 100% to 23.3% in the same period, so that there are now just over 1,000 first-language speakers left.

Nivkh is not known to be related to any other language, making it a language isolate. For classification convenience, it is included in the group of Paleosiberian languages. Many words in the Nivkh language bear a certain resemblance to words of similar meaning in other Paleosiberian languages, Ainu, Korean, or Tungusic languages, but no regular sound correspondences have been discovered to systematically account for the vocabularies of these various languages, so any lexical similarities are considered to be due to chance or to borrowing.

The Nivkh language is included in the controversial Eurasiatic languages hypothesis by Joseph Greenberg.Michael Fortescue has suggested in 1998 that Nivkh may be related to the Mosan languages, and later, in 2011, he has argued that Nivkh, which he also refers to as an "isolated Amuric language", is related to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, forming a Chukotko-Kamchatkan-Amuric language family. More recently, Sergei Nikolaev has argued in two papers for a systematic relationship between Nivkh and the Algic languages of North America and a secondary relationship between these two together and the Wakashan languages of coastal British Columbia,.