The last native speaker of the the Kamas language died in 1989. He was known as Klavdiya Plotnikova. This essentially makes the Kamas language extinct. According to the 1969 census report, there were 200 speakers of the language. Even though the language is extinct, it has been properly documented. This is largely due to the efforts of various scholars. This includes the Finnish philologist, Matthias Alexander Castren, who was among the first scholars to record the language.
The Kamas language was spoken in Russia by the Kamasin people, in the Uralic Mountains. The language was originally spoken in Siberia. An alternate name for the language is Kamassian. The language is also historically referred to as Koibal. This term is mainly used to refer to the Kamas people who switched to the Turkic Khakahs language. The Samoyed Kamas who lived in the upper Kan river referred to themselves as the Kalmazh, while the Russians refer red to them as the Kamasintsy. The Kamas did not have a written language, they used Russian when it came to writing.
Kamas is a Samoyedic language. It is grouped together with other southern languages such as Selkup and Mator. The language originated from the southern Samoyedic people who lived in the Sayan mountains and also in Southern Siberia. Part of the Kamas people became Turkicized while part of them became Russified. The surviving Kamas language falls under the Uighur-Tüküi group of languages. This group of languages are related to the Kyzyl dialect and Khakass language. Kamas is an agglutinative language. This basically means that most words only have one meaning. Unlike other languages such as English which have singular and plural words for verbs and nouns, words in the Kamas language have a singular, dual and plural terms.
