Yeniseian

Yeniseian is the small language family of central Siberia, named after the Yenisei river basin where its speakers lived. Ket is the only member still spoken, while Arin, Assan, Pumpokol and Kott are known chiefly from seventeenth-century fur-tax records and had vanished by the mid-nineteenth.

River names suggest the family once ranged far to the south and later migrated northward. It has been linked to the Xiongnu confederation and to the Jie rulers of the Later Zhao state of fourth-century northern China, whose speech may have resembled Pumpokol.

The Russian conquest of Siberia from the late sixteenth century drew the Ket northward along the river; the explorer Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt took down the oldest surviving Ket vocabulary in his travel diary of 1723. The language had no writing system of its own in this period.