Itelmen Kamchadal ethnic group native aboriginal inhabitants Kamchatka peninsula Russia Chukotko Kamchatkan language
The Itelmen, sometimes known as Kamchadal, are an ethnic group who are the original inhabitants living on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language (ethnonym: Itelmen) is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family, but it is now virtually extinct, the vast majority of ethnic Itelmens being native speakers of Russian. A. P. Volodin has published a grammar of the Itelmen language. The Itelmen had a substantial hunter-gatherer and fishing society with up to fifty thousand natives inhabiting the peninsula before they were decimated by the Cossack conquest in the 18th century. So much intermarriage took place between the natives and the Cossacks that Kamchadal now refers to the majority mixed population, and the term Itelmens at some point became reserved for persisting speakers of the Itelmen language. By 1993, there were less than 100 elderly speakers of the language left, but some 2,400 people considered themselves ethnic Itelmen in the 1989 census. By 2002, this number had risen to 3,180, and there are attempts at reviving the language. Ethnographic maps shows the Itlemens as residing primarily in the valley of the Kamchatka River in the middle of the peninsula. One of the few sources describing the Itelmen prior to total assimilation with the Russians is that of Georg Wilhelm Steller, who accompanied Lord Bering on his Second Expedition to Kamchatka.
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