Linguists cannot agree on where Itelmen comes from. The conventional view places it in the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family alongside Chukchi and Koryak, but the evidence is puzzling: only about a third of Itelmen's basic vocabulary has cognates in Chukotkan languages. Some researchers argue that Itelmen absorbed an entirely different language early in its history, possibly related to Nivkh or even Wakashan -- languages spoken thousands of kilometers away on Sakhalin Island and the Pacific Northwest coast. If true, Itelmen would be a kind of ancient creole, its Chukotkan grammatical skeleton wrapped around a lexicon from a lost, unrelated tongue. The language has two surviving dialects, Southern (Khayryuzovo) and Northern (Sedanka), though both teeter on the same precipice.

The decline began with Atlasov's Cossacks in the late 1600s. As Russian fur traders moved into Kamchatka, clashes with the Itelmen were frequent and violent. Forced conversion to Christianity followed, and by the early nineteenth century every Itelmen was required to adopt a Russian name. Intermarriage between settlers and indigenous communities produced a creole called Kamchadal -- itself a blend of Itelmen vocabulary and Russian grammar -- whose traces still linger in the Russian dialect spoken in Kamchatka today. The Soviet era accelerated the process. Itelmen communities were forcibly relocated, and children were sent to boarding schools where speaking anything but Russian was forbidden. By the end of the 1930s, Russian was the sole language of instruction everywhere on the peninsula.

Itelmen's relationship with the written word has been turbulent. In 1932, ethnographer Elizabeth Porfirevna Orlova, working with a group of Itelmen students, created a 27-letter Latin-based alphabet and published the language's first textbook. For a few years, children learned to read Itelmen in school. Then, at the end of the 1930s, Moscow mandated that all northern indigenous languages switch to Cyrillic script. Rather than adapt, authorities simply abolished Itelmen writing altogether. The language became unwritten again -- and remained so for nearly half a century. It was not until 1984 that a new Cyrillic-based alphabet of 32 letters was developed, confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Education in 1988. A second alphabet book, a bilingual dictionary, and a translation of the Gospel of Luke followed, all in the Southern dialect.

Itelmen's phonology sets it apart from its Chukotko-Kamchatkan relatives. It permits complex consonant clusters that Chukchi and Koryak do not, and it operates with a different system of vowel harmony. One of its most unusual features is a voicing distinction in fricatives but not in plosives -- a trait rare among the world's languages. Five vowel phonemes anchor the system, with a schwa of uncertain status floating between them. Russian influence has reshaped the language at every level: borrowed adjectives retain their Russian case endings intact, while borrowed verbs are reshaped to fit Itelmen's agglutinative morphology. The basic word order is subject-object-verb, and the language builds its words through suffixes layered onto roots.

Revival efforts exist but face daunting odds. Itelmen is taught as a subject in some elementary schools, yet the teachers themselves often do not speak the language fluently. A single newspaper, Aborigin Kamchatki (Kamchatkan Aborigine), publishes material in Itelmen alongside Even. Linguist Jonathan Bobaljik has dedicated years of research to documenting the language's structure and supporting revitalization. But the arithmetic is merciless: with most speakers over sixty, each passing year narrows the window. What hangs in the balance is not just a communication system but an entire cognitive architecture -- a way of naming the rivers, the salmon runs, the volcanic peaks of Kamchatka that Russian cannot replicate. When the last fluent speaker falls silent, that architecture goes with them.