WWU professor's new book links languages of Siberians and Native Americans

When the ancestors of today’s Native Americans first crossed the Bering Sea land bridge to North America thousands of years ago, they brought a root dialect that formed the basis of more than 45 languages to follow in the years to come, according to a new book by Western Washington University researcher Edward Vajda, director of WWU's Center for East Asian Studies.

Moreover, the links between that original Siberian language – today present only in the Central Siberian Yeniseian dialect called Ket – and the modern day group of languages known as the Na-Dene family, which includes Navajo, Apache, Tlingit and more than 40 others, lends further credence to the theory that the indigenous peoples of North and South America originated in the same area, speaking the same language, on the other side of the Bering Sea land bridge.

“These results demonstrate how important it is to study disappearing languages for what they can reveal about human prehistory. The clearest lesson from comparing Yeniseian and Na-Dene is that effort spent documenting the world’s disappearing languages now can have vital impact on the future,” said Vajda. “Who would have imagined the ancient words Native American and Siberian boarding-school children were punished for speaking a few decades ago could wield a power vast enough to reunite entire continents?”

Vajda’s new book, “The Dene-Yeniseian Connection,” a joint publication the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the Alaska Native Language Center, details the links between Ket and the Na-Dene language family. In his research, Vajda ventured deep into Siberia to meet with some of the few remaining speakers of Ket, learning from them more than 100 cognates – words with a common etymological origin – indelibly linking Ket to the Na-Dene family, and Old World languages to the New World.

Vajda received editing and research assistance on his book from a number of his peers at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, most notably archaeologist Ben Potter and linguist James Kari.

For more information on Vajda’s new book or the link between the Ket and Na-Dene language families, contact Edward Vajda at (360) 650-6571 or edward.vajda@wwu.edu.