Evenk

Evenki, long known in Russian sources as Tungus and in Qing records as Solon, is the largest language of the northern branch of the Tungusic family. Its speakers are reindeer-herding hunters whose ancestors are plausibly sought among the Shiwei peoples of the Greater Khingan; from the Baikal region they spread to the Okhotsk coast and, under Russian pressure, as far as Sakhalin.

When Cossacks reached the Evenki in the 1600s they imposed a fur tribute and took clan hostages, while the horse-breeding Solon of the Amur country were incorporated into the Qing Eight Banners and became renowned as frontier troops; Qing scholars also set down Solon words in the Manchu alphabet.

Evenki is agglutinative with a vocabulary rich in terms for reindeer and the hunt, and remained an unwritten oral language, later recorded in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.