Akuzipik/St. Lawrence Island/Central Siberian Yupik
For more details and references, see Koonooka, Christopher Petuwaq, Sylvia L.R. Schreiner, Giulia Masella Soldati, Lane Schwartz, Benjamin Hunt, Preston Haas, Emily Chen, and Hyunji Hayley Park. 2021. Akuzipik/Yupik (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, USA; Chukotka, Russia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 20, 135-144.
There are four mutually unintelligible languages on the Yupik branch of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family: Sugt’stun/Alutiit’stun (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq/Pacific Gulf Yupik), spoken in south-central Alaska; Yugtun/Cugtun (Yup’ik/Central Alaskan Yup’ik), in western Alaska; Naukan, in Chukotka; and Akuzipik/Yupigestun (St. Lawrence Island Yupik/Central Siberian Yupik), which is further described below.
Akuzipik is an endangered language spoken by 800-900 people in the Bering Strait region. The language is also known as St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Central Siberian Yupik, Yupigestun, or Akuzipik; and in Russian-language literature, it is referred to as Masingkestun or Chaplinski Yupik. In accordance with the desires of the community of St. Lawrence Island, we will refer to it as ‘Akuzipik’.
Most Akuzipik speakers currently live on St. Lawrence Island, but there are also some speakers on the Russian Chukotka peninsula and on the Alaskan mainland. Most, if not all, Akuzipik speakers who live on St. Lawrence Island and in Alaska are English-Akuzipik bilinguals and/or English-dominant with different levels of proficiency in Akuzipik. Up until the 1980s, nearly all St. Lawrence Islanders spoke Akuzipik at home. Nowadays, however, most children and teenagers learn Akuzipik at school as a second language. Therefore, there has been some influence from English on Akuzipik. Likewise, the Chaplinski Akuzipik dialect, spoken in the Chukotka Peninsula, has been influenced by Russian.
Although there are lexical differences between the St. Lawrence Island and Chaplinski dialects, they are still very similar and mutually intelligible. Since most of our fieldwork takes place on St. Lawrence Island, more specifically in the village of Sivuqaq (Gambell), our research focuses on the dialect spoken there.
About the Akuzipik Language
Akuzipik is a polysynthetic language. There are noun and verb “bases” (roots) to which “post-bases” (affixes – almost entirely suffixal) attach. There is an extensive system of demonstratives, as well as many “particles” (mostly adverbial, but sometimes prepositional), more than 600 derivational suffixes (“post-bases”), and enclitics.
There is a great deal of morphophonological changes at morpheme boundaries: when derivational morphemes attach to a root or to another morpheme, there are often sound changes that are also reflected in the orthography of the words.
As for the phonology of the language, there are seven vowel phonemes, / ə a a: i i: u u: /, as well as other possible allophones that are currently being studied. As for consonant sounds, there are voiceless stops, voiced and voiceless continuants, and voiced and voiceless nasals. Click here to see a chart that lists all the Akuzipik consonants in Latin orthography, Cyrillic orthography, and corresponding IPA symbols. There are no tautosyllabic consonant clusters in Akuzipik; basic syllable structure is (C)V(C) in word-initial position and CV(C) elsewhere.
There are some phonological processes, such as voicing assimilation of consonants, that take place across syllable boundaries: when a voiceless and a voiced consonant are next to each other, they tend to assimilate in voicing (usually they both become voiceless).