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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.
HistoryThe 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. ClassificationTlingit 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, involving characteristic fading vowels and glottal stops in the place of tones in both Tsimshian and Tongass Tlingit. Geographic distributionThe 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. DialectsTlingit 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 (Yakwdaat) 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 Kwáan) Tlingit, and is believed to be the relic 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. GrammarThe grammar of Tlingit is to the nonnative speaker, especially one from an IndoEuropean 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 verbThe 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. [To do: verb category diagram and verb system diagram from Dauenhauer & Dauenhauer] [To do: discuss tense, aspect, mood, agreement, etc.] The nounThe noun in Tlingit has a fairly simple role, and is marked in sentences for case, but not number or gender. Actually, number is occasionally marked to differentiate singular from plural, as in the case of the term du yádi "his/her child" which becomes du yátx'i "his/her children" in the plural. Another example is the pair káa "man" and káax'w "men". Although there is some consistency in marking of different plurals, it is perhaps more appropriate to consider each plural as a specific term that indicates plural quantity of a subject, rather than a grammatically productive application of plural marking, since plurals are rare. [To do: case diagram] Bound adverbs[To do: e.g. yóo and yéi] MorphonemicsTlingit 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. [To do: examples, e.g. wu-ya-goot → woogoot, wu-ya-gút → uwagút] SoundsTlingit, 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 fricative and affricate consonants. The only missing ejective consonant in the Tlingit series is [S_>] (X-SAMPA). Some speakers seem to be able to produce this phoneme, but have difficulty distinguishing it from [tS_>]. 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 "people", the first syllable is low tone, the second high. The X-SAMPA phonetic representation is given in the first column; the second contains the IPA representation which may not be supported by all browsers. The popular orthographic representation is given in the final column.
Writing systemTlingit was until the late 1960s written exclusively in phonetic transcription in the works of linguists and anthropologists. 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. Given below is a table of several transcription systems as compared to the popular orthography. For details on the latter see the following section.
Popular orthographyIn the late 1960s linguists Constance Naish and Gillian Story developed a popular orthography which has since been used to publish verb and noun dictionaries, instruction materials, and a small amount of native literature. The orthography has the peculiar characteristic that it requires use of underlines to differentiate uvular from velar consonants, an effective mechanism when used with typewriters and typeset materials, but one which hampers its use in electronic text. Similar problems with electronic encoding have been encountered with other languages such as Haida which use a related orthography. Of all the characters the underscore is the most difficult to encode; even though a combining underscore is available in Unicode it is not supported by popular text renderers except for a few precomposed characters encoded elsewhere in Unicode. However, speakers have reportedly represented it by an "h" following the character in emails. Since very little communication is currently transmitted electronically in Tlingit the problem has not been extensively addressed, but as language revitalization efforts begin to bear fruit, the increasingly digitally-minded children who learn the language will want to use it in such environments as email and text messaging. External links
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