Samoyedic peoples

The Samoyedic peoples are a family of closely related Indigenous peoples of northern Russia and Siberia who speak, or historically spoke, Samoyedic languages, a branch of the Uralic language family. Today they include the Nenets, Enets, Nganasans and Selkups, who live across the Arctic tundra and forest from the White Sea to the Taymyr Peninsula. Some ethnologists prefer the term "Samodeic".

The word comes from Samoyed, an old Russian name first used for the Nenets and later extended to their linguistic relatives. Its origin is debated. One popular explanation reads it as Russian for "self-eater", which foreign travellers took as a charge of cannibalism; another derives it from an expression meaning "land of the Sámi". The term has long gone out of everyday use as a name for any of these peoples, who call themselves by their own names; the Nenets name means "real people".

All the Samoyedic languages descend from a reconstructed ancestor, Proto-Samoyedic, which itself goes back to Proto-Uralic. The branches probably separated only in the last centuries BCE, so the languages remain fairly close to one another. Within Uralic, Samoyedic is traditionally seen as the first branch to split off. Some linguists have also suggested that Proto-Samoyedic strongly influenced Tocharian, an Indo-European language.

Scholars often divide the group geographically. The Northern Samoyeds are the Nenets, Enets, Nganasans and the extinct Yurats; the Southern Samoyeds are the Selkups, together with the Kamas and Mator of the Sayan Mountains, whose languages have died out. These groupings are geographical rather than strictly linguistic: linguists see Nganasan, and perhaps Mator, as the earliest to diverge.

Southern Samoyedic speakers once ranged across central Siberia, from the Ob basin to the uplands between the Sayan Mountains and Lake Baikal. According to one theory, the ancestors of the Nenets moved north from southern Siberia to the Arctic coast some time before the 12th century. In the 16th century Mangazeya, a trading town on Samoyed lands, grew into a substantial settlement before being destroyed early in the 17th century.

The northern peoples lived by hunting, fishing and reindeer herding, and large-scale reindeer herding developed in the 18th century. The Nenets bred the dog later known abroad as the Samoyed for herding and pulling sledges, and European polar explorers adopted it. Traditional belief was shamanistic and animistic, with strong respect for the land.

After the Russian Revolution, Soviet collectivisation pressed nomadic families to settle in villages, took reindeer into collective ownership and sent children to state boarding schools. This weakened traditional roles and led many, particularly in the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, to lose their language. On the Yamal Peninsula collectivisation lasted only about a decade, and reindeer numbers there recovered strongly from the 1950s.

The Nenets are by far the largest group, numbering close to 50,000 in Russia's 2021 census, most of them in the Yamalo-Nenets and Nenets autonomous okrugs and the Taymyr district. There are roughly 3,700 Selkups, mainly in Yamal and Tomsk Oblast, around 900–1,000 Nganasans and some 200–300 Enets, both chiefly in Krasnoyarsk Krai. A small number of people in Krasnoyarsk Krai still identify as Kamasin descendants. In all, about 25,000 people speak Samoyedic languages, many of them older; younger people often speak Russian first, and UNESCO lists Nenets as endangered. In Russia the Nenets have official status as one of the Indigenous small-numbered peoples, and their herding lands face pressure from oil and gas development.

Our 700 map draws a broad territory labelled "Samoyèdes" across northern Russia and western Siberia; the outline is only an approximation of where Samoyedic-speaking peoples lived. Neighbouring Uralic peoples include the Komi, shown on our 800 map.