Nivkh or Gilyak (ethnonym: Nivxi) (language, нивхгу - Nivxgu) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun , a tributary of the Amur, along the lower reaches of the Amur and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation.
Gilyak is a language isolate, i.e., it does not appear to be related to any other language. For classification convenience, it is included in the group of Paleosiberian languages.
For many centuries the Gilyaks were tributary to the Manchu empire. After the Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689 they functioned as intermediaries between the Russians, Manchu and Japanese, these last via their vassals, the Ainu. Their lands extended along the northern coast of Manchuria from the Russian fortress at Tugur eastward to the mouth of the Amur at Nikolayevsk, then south through the Straits of Tatary as far as De Castries Bay.
The Gilyaks suffered severely from the Cossack conquest and imposition of the Tsarist Russian penal policy which turned the whole island of Sakhalin into a penal settlement. There followed two occupations by the Japanese in 1904-5 and 1920-5, plus the Russian Revolution, Stalin's witch-hunts and the collectivizations, with the Gilyak being used as a 'model' nation that had gone directly from the stone age to socialism.
Despite these vicissitudes, the Gilyak nation survived. After the Russian revolution, a Gilyak Autonomous Okrug was created during the 1920s straddling the Tatar Strait. Chuner Taksami is the first modern literary figure. In the post-Soviet Russian commonwealth of nations they have fared better than the Ainu or the Kamchadals but nothing like as well as the Chukchi or the Tuvans.
References
- Anton Chekhov: "Ostrov Saxalin" Eng. transl. Brian Reeve, Cambridge 1993.
- Bruce Grant: "In the Soviet House of Culture" , Princeton 1995.
- Lev Shternberg: "The Social Organization of the Gilyak", Seattle 1999.
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