🇷🇺Ket for English speakers

1. Ket: the last living Yeniseian language

Ket is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family, spoken by a small community along the middle Yenisei river in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, centred on the settlement of Kellog in Turukhansky District.¹² It is critically endangered: Glottolog records an AES (Agglomerated Endangerment Status) of “shifting” with a qualified evidence assessment, and speaker counts in the sources reviewed for this guide range from “up to 150” in a 2005 institutional survey to “fewer than 50” in a current university faculty profile — figures that differ in date, method and likely definition of “speaker,” so this guide reports the range rather than averaging or picking one.¹³

Ket at a glance

A note on how this guide is built

Ket's verb is documented as strongly prefixing, with a template of agreement, incorporated-noun, thematic, tense/mood and root positions — and the specialist literature explicitly warns that a single simplified beginner template misrepresents it, and that metathesis and historical reanalysis can obscure the surface order of the pieces.⁴ Because of that documented complexity, this guide does not attempt to construct original Ket sentences or a graded reader the way its sister guides do for better-described languages. Every Ket word below is a single, individually attested item from a cited dictionary — never an assembled phrase. Section 6 explains this limitation directly.

Sounds and spelling

Ket prosody is reported to involve four phonemic “prosodemes” contrasting in monosyllabic words, combining pitch-like (melodic) and non-melodic properties; polysyllabic words generally carry initial non-melodic accent instead.⁵ The specialist source for this is careful to frame this as one scholarly analysis rather than a settled, simple “tone language” label, and this guide follows that caution — a learner should expect Ket's prosody to be more intricate than a beginner phrasebook can responsibly summarize.⁵ Ket Cyrillic uses several letters beyond the standard Russian alphabet, including ʼ (a glottal-stop marker), ә, ө and other vowel letters, and digraphs such as ӄ for a uvular stop — visible throughout the vocabulary tables below exactly as the source dictionary records them.

2. Everyday vocabulary: people, kin, and dwelling

3. Nature and animals

4. Everyday objects and food

5. Classification: a hypothesis, and the evidence for it

Ket's genealogical placement is unusually well documented as an open question rather than a settled fact. Within Yeniseian, Ket is uncontroversially the last living member — but proposals connecting Yeniseian to North Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, or, most prominently in recent decades, to the Na-Dené languages of North America (the “Dene-Yeniseian” hypothesis associated with Edward Vajda) remain active comparative research programs, not settled classification.²⁶ The Alaska Native Language Center, which preserves Vajda's work, frames Dene-Yeniseian explicitly as a hypothesis and documents both later supporting work and specialist critiques alongside it.⁶ This guide reports Dene-Yeniseian as contested comparative-linguistics literature, not as an established fact about Ket.

“No paradigm, glossed sentence, or vocabulary item was copied here” — the guiding rule this guide's own research dossier sets for any future Ket teaching material, precisely because Ket's documented grammar is too easy to oversimplify without a specialist or community reviewer.⁴ This guide keeps to that rule: the vocabulary above is drawn from a separate, independently citable dictionary (kaikki.org's Wiktionary extraction), and no sentence-level Ket has been constructed anywhere in this guide.

6. Why this guide has no graded reader

Every other LinguaCommons language guide includes a short constructed reading passage at each level, built from that guide's own deck vocabulary. This guide does not, for a specific and sourced reason: Ket's finite-verb morphology is documented as a multi-slot prefixing template (agreement, incorporated noun, thematic, tense/mood, and root, in that broad order) where metathesis and historical reanalysis can obscure the surface form, and the specialist literature explicitly cautions against presenting any single simplified template as a complete account.⁴ Constructing even simple original Ket sentences without that expertise — or a fluent reviewer — would risk exactly the kind of fabricated grammar this project's standing rule treats as its one unrecoverable error. The 318-word deck below is instead built entirely from individually attested, independently sourced dictionary entries, and every word is exactly as its source records it — nothing has been inflected, combined, or invented.

What a learner can safely do with this guide

Learn the 318 vocabulary items below with their attested forms and meanings; understand Ket's place in the Yeniseian family and the state of the evidence around it; and use section 7's resources to find a specialist grammar, a dictionary with audio, or a path to community contact before attempting to produce original Ket sentences.

7. Community and revitalization

The University of Hamburg maintains an Electronic Dictionary of the Ket Language (published 2025), and the nonprofit portal «Аӄта дасӄавет» offers a dictionary interface and audio recordings as a current resource-discovery route for anyone researching or learning Ket — though this guide's own research dossier is careful to note that neither source constitutes a documented claim of community governance or an established reuse permission, so any teaching use should confirm rights directly.⁷⁸ The Ket community itself is concentrated around Kellog in Turukhansky District, where Ket, Russian, and neighbouring Evenk and Selkup communities have long been in contact — this guide's deck includes the attested Ket words Хъмга (“Evenk man”) and Кыньсь (“Russian person”), reflecting exactly that long-standing contact.²⁹

• Ket vocabulary — the full 318-term deck, with SRS trainerA1–B1 — Cyrillic-based Ket orthography, browsable as a table, with CSV / TSV / Anki / .apkg downloads. Identical to the tables on this page.
• kaikki.org — Ket machine-readable dictionaryReference — The Wiktionary-derived source for every word on this guide's deck; browsable by part of speech.
• University of Hamburg — Electronic Dictionary of the Ket LanguageB1+ — Published 2025. A specialist dictionary project — the right next stop for a learner who has worked through this guide's vocabulary.
• Alaska Native Language Center — Edward Vajda's Ket and Dene-Yeniseian materialsReference — Preserves the leading specialist's published work on Ket grammar and the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, framed explicitly as ongoing research.

• All language guides — Browse every LinguaCommons language guide.