Chukchi, Koryak, Kerek, Alutor, and Itelmen form the Chukotko-Kamchatkan language family.

There are many cultural similarities between the Chukchis and Koryaks, including economies based on reindeer herding.

This emphasis on conflict can be seen in the interactions between the Chukchi and the Russians, which date back to the middle of the seventeenth century and tell of glorious battles between the two groups.

[6] The Chukchi have also been known to battle nearby tribes, particularly the Tánñit, which comprise fellow Siberian peoples known as the Koryaks.

[7] Besides trading with Russia, the Chukchi make their living off of herding reindeer and bartering with other tribes.

[8] Many Chukchis use the language as their primary means of communication both within the family and while engaged in their traditional pastoral economic activity (reindeer herding).

However, Russian is increasingly used as the primary means of business and administrative communication, in addition to behaving as a lingua franca in territories inhabited by non-Chukchis such as Koryaks and Yakuts.

[13] Until 1931, the Chukchi language had no official orthography, in spite of attempts in the 1800s to write religious texts in it.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Vladimir Bogoraz discovered specimens of pictographic/logographic writing by the Chukchi herdsman Tenevil (see ru:File:Luoravetl.jpg).

[13] It was nearly lost during the initial period of Soviet contact and subsequent Russian Arctic expeditions.

The following is the ISO 9 system of Romanization:[14] Chukchi is a largely polysynthetic, agglutinative, direct-inverse language and has ergative–absolutive alignment.

[16] In the nominals, there are two numbers and about 13 morphological cases: absolutive, ergative/instrumental, equative (copula), locative, allative, ablative, orientative, inessive, perlative, sublative, comitative, associative, and privative.

Past II is formed with a construction meaning possession (literally "to be with"), similar to the use of "have" in the perfect in English and other Western European languages.

Both subject and direct object are cross-referenced in the verbal chain, and person agreement is very different in intransitive and transitive verbs.

[15] Chukchi has periodic tense: it can incorporate the noun nәki- to build a nocturnal verb form.

The extent to which Chukchi and the Eskimo languages borrowed vocabulary between one another, or a relationship between the two, has not been studied in detail.

Many of the names of the basic numbers can be traced etymologically to words referring to the human body ("finger", "hand" etc.)

Contact influence of Russian, which is increasing, consists of word borrowing and pressure on surface syntax; the latter is primarily seen in written communication (translated texts) and is not apparent in day-to-day speech.