Nivkh

Nivkh, also called Gilyak or Amuric, is a small language family, often treated instead as a single language isolate, comprising two or three mutually unintelligible varieties spoken by the Nivkh people of Sakhalin Island and the lower Amur River and Amur Liman in Russia's Far East. Specialists studying the varieties describe them as falling into two or three distinct languages, but the language is generally presented as one for revival purposes out of concern that further division would harm those efforts. Russia's 2020 census recorded 1,300 people reporting Nivkh as a native language, out of an ethnic Nivkh population of 4,652; native-speaker numbers fell sharply across the 20th century, a decline that followed Stalin-era collectivization policies disrupting the Nivkh's traditional subsistence economy.