What is Itelmens?

Information about Itelmens

The Itelmen, sometimes known as Kamchadal, are an ethnic group who are the original inhabitants living on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language (ethnonym: Itelmen) is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, but it is now virtually extinct, the vast majority of ethnic Itelmens being native speakers of Russian. A. P. Volodin has published a grammar of the Itelmen language.

The Itelmen had a substantial hunter-gatherer and fishing society with up to fifty thousand natives inhabiting the peninsula before they were decimated by the Cossacks conquest in the eighteenth century.

So much intermarriage took place between the natives and the Cossacks that Kamchadal now refers to the majority mixed population, and the term Itelmens at some point became reserved for persisting speakers of the Itelmen language. By 1993, there were less than 100 elderly speakers of the language left, but some 2,400 people considered themselves ethnic Itelmen in the 1989 census. By 2002, this number had risen to 3,180, and there are attempts at reviving the language.

See also

Further reading

  • Schurr TG, RI Sukernik, YB Starikovskaya, and DC Wallace. 1999. "Mitochondrial DNA Variation in Koryaks and Itel'men: Population Replacement in the Okhotsk Sea-Bering Sea Region During the Neolithic". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 108, no. 1: 1-39.

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ethnic group or ethnicity is a population of human beings whose members identify with each other, usually on the basis of a presumed common genealogy or ancestry.[1] Ethnicity is also defined from the recognition by others as a distinct group[2]
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Kamchatka Peninsula (Russian: полуо́стров Камча́тка
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Anthem
Hymn of the Russian Federation


Capital
(and largest city) Moscow

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Itelmen, also sometimes known as Kamchadal, is a language belonging to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family traditionally spoken in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Fewer than a hundred native speakers, mostly elderly, in a few settlements in the southwest of Koryak Autonomous
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The Chukchi language (лыгъоравэтлъан йилйил, lyg"oravetl'an jiljil) also known as Luoravetlan, Chukot and Chukcha
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Koryak is a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language spoken by circa 3,000 people (Koryak) in the easternmost extremity of Siberia, mainly in Koryak Okrug. It is mostly a language spoken by Koryaks. Its close relative, the Chukchi language, is spoken by about twice that number.
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Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages are a language family of northeastern Siberia. The family is also known as Chukchi-Kamchatkan.

Less commonly encountered names for this family are Chukchian, Chukotian, Chukotan, Kamchukchee and
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A language family is a group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language. As with biological families, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics.
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Russian 
Writing system: Cyrillic (Russian variant)  
Official status
Official language of:  Abkhazia (Georgia)
 Belarus
 Commonwealth of Independent States (working)
 Crimea (de facto; Ukraine)
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Itelmen, also sometimes known as Kamchadal, is a language belonging to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family traditionally spoken in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Fewer than a hundred native speakers, mostly elderly, in a few settlements in the southwest of Koryak Autonomous
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Not to be confused with Kazakhs.


The Cossacks (Russian: Каза́ки, Kazaki; Ukrainian:
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The 18th Century lasted from 1701 through 1800 in the Gregorian calendar.

Historians sometimes specifically define the 18th Century otherwise for the purposes of their work.
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Intermarriage may refer to:
  • Interreligious marriage
  • Interracial marriage
  • Cultural exogamy
See also:
  • Cultural assimilation

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In human mitochondrial genetics, Haplogroup G is a human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup.

It is an East Asian haplogroup[1]. Today G is found in northeastern Siberia.
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