Kilda Kelen

"Neo-Khitanese" is a preliminary label to describe a member of the League of Lost Languages spoken today on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Siberia. Foreign scholars consider it to be an Altaic language -- the family consisting of the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic language groups, and according to some, Korean or Japanese. However, the Neo-Khitanese themselves currently reject the 'Altaic Hypothesis'.

More easily agreed upon is that Neo-Khitanese is a Tungusic language. Within that family, it is most closely related to the northern branch of that family -- specifically to Evenki (or "Tungus") and to Even (or "Lamut").

Phonologically, it has a regular system of front/back vowel harmony, in which lexical stems determine the vowel quality of any affixes. It distinguishes long from short vowels and has a simple (C)V(C) syllable structure. Grammatically, it is highly agglutinative, has basic SOV word order, accusative syntax, and a wealth of non-finite verb forms. In all these respects it is quite a typical North Tungusic language.

Its lexicon, however, shows signs of being archaic, and has many words found only in Tungusic languages of the Amur River grouping. More interestingly, however, is the large quantity of cognates or early loanwords from Preclassical or Middle Mongolian and from Old Turkic or Old Uighur -- suggesting there may be some truth to the Neo-Khitanese tradition of being descendants of the Khitans who ruled northern China under the Liao dynasty.

Neo-Khitanese has also absorbed very large numbers of lexical items from languages indigenous to Kamchatka (Ainu of the Kurile Islands and Itelmen, primarily the Southern and Eastern Itelmen languages) and from languages neighboring Kamchatka (the Koryak and Alutor languages, and more recently from Aleut and Pacific Yupik -- confusingly now called Aluutiq). There are even a small number of foreign loans from the heyday of Neo-Khitanese seafaring and trading in the Pacific Rim: from Tlingit, Haida, Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Dutch. In the 19th and 20th century, Neo-Khitanese has proven much more conservative towards foreign influences than it has in the past, and has (relatively) few 'global' or 'international' vocabulary items from English or Russian. In any event, none of these languages are related to Tungusic or even to the Altaic family. Perhaps as much as 1/4 or even 1/3 of the total lexicon is of non-Altaic or non-Tungusic origin.

The Neo-Khitanese in Kamchatka continued to use forms of the Khitan logosyllabic writing system until the early nineteenth century, when Latin orthographies were adopted. The language has also been written in Japanese katakana (during 1941-1945), the Russian Cyrillic alphabet (primarily by Orthodox missionaries, priests, and converts beginning in the early 1700s), and in a "runic" syllabary devised in the late 1800s on the basis of the old Khitan script.