The title above gives three ways of writing "the Ket (Yenisei Ostyak) people and their words (language)", in official Ket Cyrillic, in the practical orthography used by the community, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet, used by linguists, with the hight-flat (ā) and rising-falling (áà) tones marked, and then of course English and Russian.

(Перевод этой страницы на русский язык ожидается когда-то в ближайшем будущем. К сожалению пока не успел, но если что, напишите мне: mccarter@ucsd.edu)

Illustrations of traditional life: a Ket woman in a traditional scarf gathering wild mushrooms and berries, boys and their dog fishing in the river (but note the motor, introduced already in the Soviet era), from Этна Бинян, К,аан (Our Own Words), Russian title Кетский язык: учебник для 2 класса, "The Ket language, a textbook for 2nd grade", Вернер, Николаева (2000), one of the few books published (mostly) in Ket.

Ket (keˀt 'person, friend',  plural deˀŋ, which might be connected to what the Navajo call themselves, Diné 'the people',  as do the other Dene, previously 'Athabaskan', nations) is the last still-spoken of the Indigenous, polysynthetic Yeniseian languages of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai, a large province in central Siberia, with tundra in the far north, dense taiga forest in the central region, and the Altai and Sayan mountains yet further south, eventually giving way to the Mongolian steppe. Other Yeniseian languages, Ket's near-forgotten cousins, were spoken in southern Siberia as recently as the 1840's, before their speakers were assimilated by speakers of Turkic and Mongolic languages, and then often Russian, and Ket's sister language Yugh was spoken in villages near the Kets into the 1970's (one man in the 2010 census listed his ethnicity as Yugh). Yeniseian languages in prehistory were once spoken as far south as Mongolia. The Kets and their relatives and neighbors  (mostly notably the Selkup, one of the Samoyedic peoples, distant linguistic cousins of the Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, and Sámi; the word for a Selkup person in Ket, laˀk, means 'friend' in the Selkup language) lived primarily as subsistence foragers (hunter-gatherers) in the dense taiga forests, and as fisherpeople along the Yenisei river and its many tributaries. This was their way of life from deep, immemorial prehistory, without chiefs, social stratification or division of labor, except according to gender, age, health, and sometimes skill as a shaman, without writing, agriculture or domestic animals other than dogs, and with their own, often very practical and egalitarian, in an animistic way (trees are 'he', bears are 'grandfather', in some stories, dogs have extended conversations with God in Heaven, and a rabbit and a wood grouse act as shamans), ideas about the world and their place in it.  It survived through the Russian Imperial period, when they payed tribute in furs to the Tsar and kept Orthodox icons next to traditional statuettes representing the protective spirits of the land and ancestors, until the 1930's, when the Soviet state began forcibly settling and attempting to integrate Native Siberians (the peoples of the North, народы Севера) into Soviet society, in practice, through forced russification. Now the Kets live either in small, remote villages on their traditional lands, or in the diaspora in Krasnoyarsk or other nearby (in Siberian terms) cities in Siberia. 

For more, see Artic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North by Yuri Slezkine, Edward Vajda's articles on the traditional Ket landscape, and on Ket Shamanism, or if you read Russian,  Кеты: этнографические очерки (The Kets:  ethnographic sketches) by Aleksandra Alekseenko (1976).

As a result of Soviet policies and their legacy, most ethnic Kets (only approx. 1,100 people) now speak only Russian as a first language, while only a portion of the elders still remember Ket fluently and use it amongst themselves, alongside Russian. I work with one of them, my teacher (ad=da sir-a-q-a-d-dəj kɛˀt, roughly lit. 'me=she learn-make-now-me-often.does person', or just ab siraʁat kɛˀt 'my teaching person') and honorary grandma (bu - ab qima bila, 'she my grandmother (is) like'). Her name is Valentina Andreevna (her name and patronymic, you say both to show respect) in Russian or Təŋdəliŋ in Ket, and we work together over Skype and Whatsapp, as we have since February 2021 (trips to visit and work with the community in Siberia in person have been so far obstructed, first by the pandemic, and then by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and Russia's backslide into totalitarianism). I get to be part of a small, but dedicated group, with the Ket community, my senior colleagues in Ket and Yeniseian linguistics, anthropology (in Russian we say ketologiya, and we're ketologi, 'Ketologists', see especially my senior colleague Edward Vajda, who knows more about Ket than I could in many lifetimes) and wider Native Siberian studies, and some other non-Indigenous friends of the Ket people, who are working to learn as much as we can, record as much as we can, figure out as much as we can, and publish as much as we can (for the Ket community first of all, and then for other linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and other scientists who study us humans), while my teacher and the other fluent elders are still with us. The unique contribution I get to offer is as a formally-trained theoretical morphologist and typologist, a cognitive scientist who studies humans, our minds, histories, and cultures, through the structures and diversity of our languages (see my main page).

My teacher is also trying to teach me to speak Ket, and I'm trying to learn, with the idea that I will probably be around longer than she will, and I can help Ket people of my generation bring their language back, even when she is gone (I shudder at the thought of that day). All credit to her, if my interlocutor is very patient, and we speak very slowly, I can talk about quite a few things, and it is hard to overstate how much the language, and the voices from the northern taiga forests that still echo through their language, have taught me, and how grateful I am.

Another non-Ket friend of the community put together a video of my teacher working with me and other linguists, with an introduction by my senior colleague, chair of the Department of Siberian Indigenous Languages at Tomsk State Pedagogical University, in Russia. Most of the video is in Russian, but you can watch it on Youtube, and hear some good samples of spoken Ket.

Ket has many fascinating and often puzzling features of its own, especially in the complex structure of its verbs, which are the main focus on my research (see Nefedov and Vajda 2015's grammar sketch in The Comprehensive Ket Dictionary, Vajda's 2004 grammar simply titled Ket, and also my open-access article in Morphology on polyfunctionality in the marking of subjects, objects, and tense on the verb, and its relationship to implicative structure, interdependencies between elements in the system, and a sample chapter of my dissertation, focusing on roots and derivational morphology in verb stems, and a little on their implications for a theory of linguistic morphology and morphosyntax, in my view.). 

However, Ket's biggest claim to fame is that it might share a distant ancestor with the languages of the Dene peoples (dene or diné meaning simply 'the people', previously Athabaskan, after some random lake in Canada), whose ancestral lands spread across the US Southwest, and northern Mexico, including the Navajo language, by far the largest Native language of the US by number of speakers, as well as inland Alaska and the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia in northwestern  and western Canada, and one language still spoken in northern California (Hupa, a few others used to be spoken in NorCal and southern Oregon), along with the more-distantly related languages of the Tlingit and Eyak peoples in southern Alaska. The language of the neighboring Haida people, once thought to be part of Na-Dene, is now known to belong to its own family. The Eyak language's last native speaker passed away in 2008, but the language now has new native speakers among the children of the community, as do Tlingit, and some Dene languages (though far from all). This is thanks to the past and ongoing efforts of some amazing and dedicated speakers, language teachers and learners, and linguists and other scholars, both from within the communities and among friends of the communities, which gives hope still for Ket.

The Ket language, according to the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, has survived in remote Siberia from a time when its distant ancestor language, which is hypothesized to have evolved into Yeniseian in Asia and the common ancestor of the Dene languages, Eyak, and Tlingit in North America, was still spoken only in Asia (Wikipedia page on Dene-Yeniseian, and see Vajda 2010, and the recent book Fortescue & Vajda 2022, for details). A possible time estimate for that language, called Proto-Dene-Yeniseian by linguists, is about 5,000-7,000 years ago, which would make Ket roughly about as distantly related to Navajo and Tlingit, possible a good amount more, as English is to Pashtun in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Bangla (Bengali) in India and Bangladesh, if one disregards the vocabulary borrowed from European languages, or the other way around, or borrowed by both groups from Persian or Arabic. Listening or even reading, you will understand (almost) nothing, and it takes years of study to learn the other language, but the more one digs into the history, the more parallels one finds. It's still a hypothesis, and while promising, it is not proven, although recent work by my senior colleague Edward Vajda, who proposed the hypothesis, looks better and more detailed every year. However, even if ultimately unrelated to Na-Dene, Ket still shows many features which are rare for Asia but common in North America, and comparison with Ket has much to contribute to Native American and First Nations studies, especially but not only linguistics, as well as for understanding the ancient history of Asia. 

Paraphrasing the conclusion of Vajda's 2010 article, a unique connection between the United States/Canada and Russia, in the form of languages that mere decades ago each settler colonial empire was still actively trying to eradicate, and whose people it has still not done right by since, has a certain beautiful irony. It should make us stop, reconsider our values and identities, and celebrate and try to protect and understand both our own diversity and that of our supposed enemy.

Unfortunately, Putin's war against Ukraine, the resulting economic crisis, and backslide into totalitarian nationalism in Russia, all of which have disproportionately affected the poorest parts of the country and especially Russia's colonized peoples, driven most academics in Russia abroad, and otherwise made most international cooperation impossible or dangerous, have all been major obstacles to meaningful revitalization work. We all hope for, but have learned not to expect, better days soon. 

If you're interested in learning more about Ket, or about collaborating in some way, let me know: mccarter@ucsd.edu