Reviewed by Dejan Matić, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Yukaghir languages, conventionally classified as Palaeosiberian and often considered distantly related to the Uralic family, covered the greater part of northeast Siberia until the advent of the Russians in the seventeenth century. The number of languages or dialects spoken at that time is uncertain because most sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are unsystematic word lists. What is certain is that today only two languages remain: Kolyma and Tundra Yukaghir, each with less than one hundred speakers. Thus, the research contributing to their documentation is of utmost importance.

Irina Nikolaeva has carried out fieldwork among the Kolyma Yukaghirs over the past decades and published an important series of text collections (Fol’klor Jukagirov verkhnej Kolymy. Jakutsk: Jakutskij gosudarstvennyj universitet, 1988; Yukaghir texts. Szombathely: Berzsenyi Főiskola, 1997; Online Kolyma Yukaghir documentation. www.sgr.fi/yukaghir, 2004). This dictionary represents a step further in her work on this language family. According to the cover text, this volume has two purposes: first, to provide a comprehensive lexicographical description of all varieties of Yukaghir and second, to offer a reconstruction of the Proto-Yukaghir phonology and lexicon.

The book begins with an introduction (1–94), which offers far more than its name may suggest: in addition to general information on the structure of the dictionary, the introduction provides a rich philological discussion of the Yukaghir sources from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, a description of the sources for Modern Yukaghir languages, an excellent account of the Modern Yukaghir phonology, and an outline of the phonology of Proto-Yukaghir, established on the basis of internal reconstruction and external data.

The dictionary itself (95–463) has 2623 entries. Each entry is headed by a reconstructed Proto-Yukaghir root or word and, in case of loanwords, by a word from the source language. This heading is followed by Yukaghir lexical data. The data within each entry are systematized in groups that correspond to lexical items derived from the given Proto-Yukaghir root or word. Within a group, the data are cited in a fixed order: first Modern Kolyma Yukaghir, then Modern Tundra Yukaghir, and at the end attestations from older sources. In practice, this means that a lemma based on a reconstructed root may contain information on up to twenty lexical items derived from it, so that the overall number of lexemes in the dictionary can be safely estimated to lie between 10,000 and 15,000. Many entries are rounded off with a phonological, etymological, or historical commentary. The book closes with an index of meanings and a language index (464–500).

This dictionary is an ambitious and successful project. N has brilliantly mastered a number of difficult tasks, most of which bear one or another superlative epithet: this is the first Yukaghir dictionary to appear in English, it is the most comprehensive lexicographical account of Yukaghir that has ever been published, and it provides the first reconstruction of the Proto-Yukaghir lexicon. Especially impressive is its breadth of coverage: N uses practically all relevant historical and contemporary sources and covers all known varieties of Yukaghir.

This book will prove invaluable to those dealing with the diachronic and synchronic linguistics of Eurasia and to the small community of people working on Yukaghir. Although the latter would certainly have been happier if, in addition to the existing indices, a word index had been included, since it is not always easy to find, say, a Kolyma Yukaghir word by looking up the entries headed by reconstructed Proto-Yukaghir forms (e.g. ataqi ‘spider’ is found under *ataqi, but a:- ‘do’ is listed under *wa:-). This notwithstanding, N’s book is a major breakthrough in the field of Yukaghir and Eurasian studies.