Language Contact in North-Eastern Siberia

This special issue brings together selected contributions presented at the workshop on Language and Culture Contact in North-Eastern Siberia which took place in Münster in October 2022.1 Its aim is to showcase and explore different types of linguistic contacts among the indigenous groups and their structural and cultural consequences in the north-eastern part of Siberia.As noticed by Pakendorf (2010: 715), in view of the harsh climate and the extremely low population density, Siberia is the last place where one would expect a lot of language and population contact to take place.This is all the more true for the arguably least hospitable part of this landmass, north-eastern Siberia, in which the population density does not exceed 0,5 persons per square kilometre and the temperatures often fall under -50⁰C.This volume shows that, despite the conditions that are anything but conducive to population contacts, northeastern Siberia has witnessed linguistic and cultural mixtures which do not fall short of balmier regions in terms of intensity and variability of contact scenarios and outcomes.There are many reasons why language contact is pervasive even in a region such as north-eastern Siberia, but we take it that three have been decisive: the Russian colonisation, the high mobility of the nomadic indigenous population, matić