The Samoyedic languages are spoken on both sides of the Ural mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by perhaps 30,000 speakers altogether. There are four extant languages, viz. Nenets, Enets and Qanasan, all mutually intelligible, and the more divergent Selkup, formerly known as 'Ostyak Samoyed'. Together with the Finno-Ugric languages and Yukaghir, they form the Uralic branch of the Ural-Altaic linguistic phylum. Nowadays the unity of Ural-Altaic is much doubted.
Samoyed territory extends from the White Sea to the Laptev Sea, along the Arctic shores of European Russia, including southern Novaya Zemlya, the Yamal peninsula, the mouths of the Ob and the Yenisei and into the Taimyr peninsula in northernmost Siberia. Their economy is based on reindeer herding. They are contiguous with the trans-Ural Ugric speakers and the cis-Ural Permic Finns to the south, but they are cut off from the Baltic Finns by the Russians in the west and, in the east, by the north Turkic Yakut from the Yukaghir. A substantial Samoyed city grew up at Mangazeya in 1600 but was destroyed by the Muscovy company to stop English trading penetration.
