The name Chukchi is derived from ‘chavchu’ or “reindeer man”. They live in the extreme northeastern part of Siberia. They got a sea named after them: Chukchi Sea. It’s near the Bering Sea named after Vitus Bering who also got a lot of stuff around there named after him after he died on Bering Island. Anyway, it’s all north of the Kamchatkan Peninsula which is that long hanging out part on the far east of Russia.
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So the Chukchi got their own Autonomous District. It’s pretty big but this permafrost-ville! You got some mountain taiga, flat tundra and some frozen desert. That’s ‘frozen desert’ not ‘frozen dessert’ which is yummy when you thaw it out. But the 15,000 Chukchis only make up 25% of the people there with 50% of them Russian.
A strange thing about the Chukchi language is that men and women pronounce some words differently. The women use a ‘ts’ sound where the men use an ‘r’ sound since that sound is considered unsuitable for women.
No surprise, the Chukchis have all kinds of ways to say ‘reindeer’. The name exists in many forms depending on the age, color, gender or nature of the animal. The Russians gave the Chukchis a new written language which sounds good but then they made them all speak Russian in school and all information was in Russian so they might have saved themselves the trouble. In the 1960s, there was a boom in mixed marriages which hurt the Chukchi language even worse than the Soviet policies did.