Alyutor or Alutor is a language of Russia that belongs to the Chukotkan branch of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. Sociolinguistic situation The Alutor are the indigenous inhabitants of the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The language is unwritten and moribund; in the 1970s residents of the chief Alutor village of Vyvenka under the age of 25 did not know the language. In recent years the Vyvenka village school has started teaching the language. Until 1958 the language was considered the "village" (settled) dialect of the Koryak language, but it is not intelligible with traditionally nomadic varieties of Koryak. The autonym means "villager". Orthography Typology Alutor is a polysynthetic language. The morphology is agglutinative, with extensive prefixes and suffixes. The argument structure is ergative. The word order is variable, and it is difficult to say which typology is basic. The verb-absolutive orders AVO and VAO are perhaps most common. Phonology Vowels Alyutor has six vowels, five of which may be long or short. The schwa cannot be long. Consonants There are 18 consonants in Alyutor. Stress Stress generally falls on the second syllable of polysyllabic words, and on the first syllable of disyllabic words, e.g.: 'water', 'skin', 'to feed', 'husband', 'mukluk'. An open syllable containing schwa cannot be stressed. As a consequence, if a disyllabic term begins with such a syllable, the stress is shifted to the last syllable and thereafter a new, epenthetic syllable is added at the end, e.g.: * -> 'mosquito'. The final syllable of a word is never stressed. Syllable structure All Alyutor syllables begin with a single consonant. If the vowel is short, including a schwa, they may also close with a single consonant. Consonant clusters are not permitted in the word initial or word final positions. The schwa is used to brake disallowed clusters. Examples are 'to work', 'eagle', 'parka'. Alyutor word boundaries always coincide with syllable boundaries. Morphology Alyutor has the following parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs, participles, adverbs, postpositions, conjunctions, and particles. Nouns Nouns are inflected for number, case, definiteness, and grammatical person. There are three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural. There are eleven cases: absolutive, ergative, locative, dative, lative, prolative, contractive, causative, equative, comitative, and associative. Number and case are expressed using a single affix. A suffix is used for all cases except the comitative and associative, which are expressed using circumfixes. There are two declensions, taught as