Evidentiality in Northern Asia

Evidentiality – or grammaticalized encoding of information source – is a feature of many languages of Northern Asia. Our overview of evidential systems across the region focuses on the values of evidential terms and their distribution across language families and contact zones in the Altaic areal grouping, with a focus on Siberian Turkic, Tungusic, and North Mongolic, the Uralic family (Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic), a number of isolates – Ket as the only extant representative of the Yeniseian family, Yukaghir and Nivkh, and the languages of the eastern periphery of the region (Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskaleut). In most languages, the expression of evidentiality tends to be restricted to past tense and/or perfectives and resultatives. Newly developed forms tend not to have these restrictions. Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic have two or three evidentials (neutral and indirect, or neutral, direct, and indirect). Additional evidential values may develop on the basis of periphrastic forms. A further reported evidential tends to evolve via grammaticalization of speech verbs. Small systems with two choices (firsthand versus nonfirsthand) are a feature of Yukaghir, Aleut, and possibly Chukchi, Koryak, and Alutor, from the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. Within the Uralic family, evidential systems in Samoyedic languages are the most complex. Elaborate evidentials in Nivkh are falling out of use, due to language obsolescence.