Tlingit language
The
Tlingit ("
Lingít")
language is the language of the
Tlingit people of
Southeast Alaska and Western
Canada. It is considered to be a branch of the
Na-Dené language family. Tlingit is very
endangered, with about 500 native speakers still living, essentially all of whom are bilingual or near-bilingual in English. Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast
Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and its culture.
The history of Tlingit is poorly understood, mostly because there is no written record until first contact with Europeans around the 1790s, and even then it remains sparse and irregular until the early 20th century. The language appears to have spread northward from the
Ketchikan"
Saxman area towards the
Chilkat region, since certain conservative features are reduced gradually from south to north. The shared features between the
Eyak language found around the
Copper River delta and
Tongass Tlingit near the
Portland Canal are all the more striking for the distances that separate them, both geographic and linguistic.
Tlingit is currently classified as a distinct and separate branch of the
Na-Dené family of North American languages, with its closest relative being
Eyak. It was once believed to be a linguistic isolate until studies in the 20th century showed connection to Eyak and hence to
Athabaskan languages. Connections to
Haida have been occasionally proposed, but are mostly discounted at present, with Haida being considered a linguistic isolate.
A connection was found by
Jeff Leer in the 1980s between the nearly-extinct Tongass Tlingit dialect and
Tsimshian. Characteristic fading and glottalized vowels found in Tsimshianic languages also appear in Tongass Tlingit in place of the expected tone systems as used in other Tlingit dialects. Further research has shown that this fading and glottalized vowel system is ancestral to the tone systems of the other Tlingit dialects, in that none of the tone systems can be directly correlated to each other but all can be reconciled in the Tongass Tlingit vowel system. It is unclear whether Proto-Tlingit developed this system out of influence from its Tsimshianic neighbors, or if the Tsimshianic languages adopted the vowel system from Proto-Tlingit which was subsequently lost in all but Tongass Tlingit, if Proto-Tlingit had a different system altogether which was somehow aligned with the Tsimshianic system, or if instead the two systems are merely coincidentally similar.
Geographic distribution
The Tlingit language is distributed from near the mouth of the
Copper River down the open coast of the
Gulf of Alaska and throughout almost all of the islands of the
Alexander Archipelago in
Southeast Alaska. It is characterized by four or five distinct but mostly mutually intelligible dialects, for which see below. Almost all of the area where the Tlingit language is endemic is contained within the modern borders of
Alaska except for an area known as
Inland Tlingit which extends up the
Taku River and into northern
British Columbia and the
Yukon Territory around the
Atlin (
Áa Tlein) and
Teslin (
Deisleen) lake districts. Except for these areas, Tlingit is not found in
Canada, although Tlingit legend tells that the Tlingit once inhabited the
Nass River or
Skeena River valleys during their migration from the interior.
Dialects
Tlingit is divided into roughly four major dialects, all of which are essentially mutually intelligible, at least with some patience between listener and speaker. The northernmost dialect arguably does not exist, but is nevertheless called the
Yakutat (
Yakhwdaat) dialect after its principal town. The Northern dialect is spoken in an area south from
Lituya Bay (
Litu.aa) to
Frederick Sound. The Southern dialect is spoken from Frederick Sound south to the Alaska-Canada border, excepting
Annette Island which is the reservation of the
Tsimshian people, and the southern end of
Prince of Wales Island which is the land of the
Kaigani Haida. The fourth major dialect is the
Inland Tlingit dialect spoken in Canada around
Atlin Lake and
Teslin Lake. Also a dialect now on the verge of extinction was once spoken in the
Saxman area near
Ketchikan, called Tongass (
Taanta Khwáan) Tlingit, and is believed to be the relict of an intermediate language between Tlingit and
Tsimshian; its living status is not known at the time of writing, although in the late 1990s two native speakers were reported.
Tlingit, like many North American aboriginal languages, has a rich and complex phonological system. It is famous for having an almost complete series of ejective consonants accompanying its stop, fricative, and affricate consonants. The only missing ejective consonant in the Tlingit series is
IPA , which might be written
sh' in the popular orthography. Some speakers seem to be able to produce this phoneme, but have difficulty distinguishing it from
ch' . Tlingit is also notable for having several laterals but no , and no labials in most dialects, except for and in recent English loans.
Consonants in the popular orthography are given in the following table, with IPA equivalents in brackets. Marginal phonemes are placed in parentheses.
The consonant
m is a variant of
w found in the Interior Tlingit dialect. The consonant
ll is a variant of
n now mostly obsolete, but still occasionally heard among the oldest speakers. The consonant
ÿ is heard in some conservative Yakutat Tlingit speakers, and is a distinct consonant from
y with which it has merged among all other speaker of Tlingit. It shows up as a
g occasionally in placenames derived from Tlingit during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in some transcriptions by earlier anthropologists.
Young speakers and second language learners of Tlingit are increasingly making a voiced/unvoiced distinction between consonants rather than the traditional unaspirated/aspirated distinction. For speakers which make the voiced/unvoiced distinction the distribution is symmetrical with the unaspirated/aspirated distinction among other speakers.
Tlingit has a fairly small vowel inventory. All vowels are paired by a combination of length and tension, and are usually explained as "long" and "short". The orthography indicates the long vowels by two-letter symbols, and the short vowels by single letter symbols.
Tlingit is a
tonal language, and has two tones, neutral (usually called low) and high. In common writing only the high tone is marked, with an acute accent over the first graph in a vowel. Thus in the word
lingít "person, people", the first syllable is low tone, the second high.
Main article: Tlingit alphabet
Tlingit was until the late 1960s written exclusively in phonetic transcription in the works of linguists and anthropologists, except for a little known Cyrillic alphabet used for publications by the
Russian Orthodox Church. A number of amateur anthropologists doing extensive work on the Tlingit had no training in linguistics whatsoever and left numerous samples in vague and inconsistent transcriptions, the most famous being
George T. Emmons. However, such noted anthropologists as
Franz Boas,
John R. Swanton, and
Frederica de Laguna have transcribed Tlingit in various related systems which feature accuracy and consistency, though sacrificing readability.
Two problems ensue from the multiplicity of transcription systems used for Tlingit. One is that there are many of them, thus requiring any reader to learn each individual system depending on what sources are used. The second problem is that most transcriptions made before
Franz Boas's study of Tlingit have numerous mistakes in them, particularly because of misinterpretations of the short vowels and ejective consonants. Thus it is important to check any given transcription against similar words in other systems, or ideally against a modern work postdating Naish and Story's work in the 1960s.
The grammar of Tlingit is to the non-native speaker, especially one from an
Indo-European background, fiendishly complex. It is characterizable as a
SOV language, although some have argued that it is possibly
OSV. Nouns are marked for case in a manner similar to
Japanese, but not number or gender. Verbs agree with the object noun phrase, and decompose into a complex set of category affixes (prefix, infix, and suffix) adjoined to the verb stem.
The verb
The
verb in Tlingit is both the most important and the most complex part of speech in the language. The verb in Tlingit often fulfills roles which in other languages might be supported by noun compounds, adjectives, or complex phrases.
The noun
The nominal declension in Tlingit includes the marking of both case and number (the former more than the latter), but there is no gender.
Number consists of the opposition between singular and plural, for example
du yádi "his/her child" which becomes
du yátx'i "his/her children" in the plural. Another example is the pair
kháa "man" and
kháax'w "men". Number, on the whole, is relatively rare and non-productive as many nouns do not inflect for number. There is also a periphrastic distributive
hás which is used only with kinship terms to indicate a group of kin, as in
axh sáni hás "my paternal uncles". Since kinship terms are a closed class this syntactic construction is non-productive.
Bound adverbs
Morphonemics
Tlingit has a complex interaction between
morphology and
phonemics in that many morphological affixes undergo phonemic change depending on their context.
Contraction,
assimilation,
metathesis, and
epenthesis are all common effects of morphological processes.
*
Lingít Yoo X'atángi: The Tlingit Language*
Tlingit Teaching and Learning Aids**
Tlingit Noun Dictionary**
Tlingit Verb Dictionary (unfinished)**
Tongass Text*
Alaskan Orthodox Christian texts (Tlingit)*
The Russian Church and Native Alaskan Cultures: Preserving Native Languages*
Yukon Native Language Centre*
Talking about Beliefs: The Alaskan Tlingit language today* Boas, Franz. (1917).
Grammatical notes on the language of the Tlingit Indians. University of Pennsylvania Museum anthropological publications.
* Dauenhauer, Nora M.; & Dauenhauer, Richard (Eds.). (1987).
Haa shuká [Our ancestors]. Seattle: University of Washington & Sealaska Heritage Foundation.
* """ (1990).
Haa Tuwunáagu Yís [For healing our spirit]. Seattle: University of Washington & Sealaska Heritage Foundation.
* """ (Eds.). (1994).
Haa Kusteeyí, our culture: Tlingit life stories. Classics of Tlingit oral literature (No. 3). Seattle: University of Washington & Sealaska Heritage Foundation.
* """ (Eds.). (1995). A Tlingit ceremonial speech by Willie Marks. In M. Dürr, E. Renner, & W. Oleschinski (Eds.),
Language and culture in Native North America (pp. 239-244). München: LINCOM.
* """ (2000).
Beginning Tlingit, 4th ed. Sealaska Heritage Foundation Press: Juneau, Alaska. ISBN 0-9679311-1-8. (First edition 1994).
* """ (2002).
Lingít X'éinax Sá! Say it in Tlingit: A Tlingit phrase book. Sealaska Heritage Institute: Juneau, Alaska. ISBN 0-9679311-1-8.
* Dauenhauer, Richard. (1974). Text and context of Tlingit oral tradition. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison).
* Dryer, Mattew. (1985). Tlingit: An object-initial language?
Canadian Journal of Linguistics,
30, 1-13.
* Dürr, Michael; Renner, Egon; & Oleschinski, Wolfgang (Eds.). (1995).
Language and culture in Native North America: Studies in honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. LINCOM studies in Native American linguistics (No. 2). München: LINCOM. ISBN 3-89586-004-2.
* Leer, Jeffery A. (1990). Tlingit: A portmanteau language family? In P. Baldi (Ed.),
Linguistics change and reconstruction methodology (pp. 73-98). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
* """ (1991).
The Schetic Categories of the Tlingit verb. University of Chicago Department of Linguistics: Chicago, Illinois. PhD dissertation.
* Naish, Constance M. (1966).
A syntactic study of Tlingit. (Unpublished M.A. thesis University of North Dakota).
* Naish, Constance M.; & Story, Gillian L. (1973).
Tlingit verb dictionary. Summer Institute of Linguistics: College, Alaska.
* """ (1996).
The English-Tlingit dictionary: Nouns (3rd ed.; H. Davis & J. Leer, Eds.). Sheldon Jackson College: Sitka, Alaska. (Revision of the Naish-Story dictionary of 1963.)
