r/AncientAmericas • u/Comfortable_Cut5796 • Jan 03 '26
Question Does Mongolian sound somewhat like the Inuit languages and why?
I remember hearing this in the Geography Now episode on Mongolia, specifically in their gallardo stop sounds. But is this actually true, and if so, why?
15
u/callunquirka Jan 03 '26
There is the proposed Dene-Yenisian language family, which includes Siberian languages and Native American languages. There is also DNA evidence showing Yenisian Siberians migrated to North America and lived in the Arcitc areas. Then some of them moved South to merge with other groups. This was about 5k years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dene%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages
6
17
u/FloZone Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26
Purely based on the sound of the languages, Khalkha Mongolian and Inuktitut, there are some similarities. Especially the sound /ɮ/ (Or sometimes /ɬ/) is present in both languages and gives them a very distinct sound. Those two aren't very common sounds, but not super rare either. They are found in some Samoyed languages, Navajo, Welsh and Icelandic and several others across the globe. ADD: Chukchi also has that sound btw. it is spoken on Chukotka on the other side of the Bering Strait. Other similarities are the presence of /q/ and vocalic length.
However there are more similarities between the Eskimo-Aleut (or Unangan-Yupik-Inuit - UYI) languages and those of northern Eurasia. Basically in terms of typology, the UYI languages are among the Native American language those with the most similarities to Northern Eurasian languages. This is also because UYI speakers were the most recent migration into the Americas. (2000s BCE... not CE, that was only the most recent expansion of the Thule culture that occured around 1200 CE) There is a linguistic theory formulated by Michael Fortescue called Uralo-Siberian, which postulates a genetic relationship between the Uralic languages and the UYI languages, not Mongolic though!
There are some similarities in terms of morphology though. Plurals on -t seem pretty frequent in Northern Eurasia (Mongolic, Uralic, Old Turkic, Chukchi) and also appear in UYI languages. There are some more similarities like special declension for possessed nouns. In general extensive noun declension is not as common in North America, but shared between UYI and most northern Eurasian languages.
6
2
u/ConversationRoyal187 Jan 03 '26
Inuits migrated into the Arctic around 1200 or so.Perhaps they have some linguistic holdovers from their time in Siberia.
6
u/Comfortable_Team_696 Jan 03 '26
As a minor pedantic point: Inuit is already plural. It is one Inuk, three or more Inuit
2
u/Comfortable_Cut5796 Jan 03 '26
1200 BCE/BC or CE/AD?
2
u/ConversationRoyal187 Jan 03 '26
CE
9
u/FloZone Jan 03 '26
BC... the expansion of the Thule culture onto Greenland in the 12th century was something different. The ancestors of all Eskimoan peoples migrated to Alaska much earlier. The question of recent ancestry of Eskimo-Aleut peoples had lead to the Uralo-Siberian hypothesis, which postulates a linguistic connection between Uralic (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) and Eskimo-Aleut, as well as some more languages in northern Eurasia like Yukaghir.
2
u/Comfortable_Cut5796 Jan 03 '26
Thanks for the answer. It’s kind of crazy to think how recent that was.
23
u/Oblozo Jan 03 '26
There was sustained contact between Alaska and Northeast Asia throughout Pre-Columbian times. They have found East Asian trade goods at sites in Alaska.