This paper argues that the observations of scholars are shaped by the historically conditioned ideological presuppositions they hold about what language is and what characteristics of speakers it conveys. European observers in the nineteenth century – linguists, explorers, natural scientists – brought one broad set of ideas to the task of observation. They presumed that languages are like organisms, firmly bounded, revealing speakers’ essence. Within these assumptions, observers differed according to their disciplinary interests and their differing social relations to the people they observed, as shown by widely varying reports about the languages of peoples in Northwestern Siberia.

This chapter focuses of languages of Northern Eurasia. In particular, Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic, Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic languages are discussed, along with other, unrelated languages of Siberia. Their geographical distribution, historical relatedness and linguistic peculiarities (such as vowel harmony and agglutinative morphology) are outlined and illustrated. The final section illuminates one linguistic feature common to many languages of the region: the so-called evidential markers, which indicate the source of evidence for the speaker’s assertion.