Nivkh

Nivkh, long called Gilyak in Russian sources, is the language of the Nivkh fishermen and hunters of the lower Amur, the Amgun basin and northern Sakhalin, and stands as a language isolate, or the small Amuric family on its own.

Its varieties form a dialect continuum along the Amur and Sakhalin coasts whose extremes are not mutually intelligible; no link to any other family has been demonstrated.

The Nivkh have lived on the river and the island for thousands of years, trading with Ainu, Japanese and Chinese neighbors until Russians reached the Amur country in the 1600s. The language is agglutinating with subject-object-verb order and consonant lenition, where one word's final sound changes the next word's opening consonant. It had no script of its own and was carried by oral tradition, only later being written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet.