Na-Dene (also
Nadene,
Na-Déné, etc., , also
Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit,
Tlina-Dene) is a
Native American language family which includes at least the
Athabaskan languages,
Eyak, and
Tlingit languages. An inclusion of
Haida is controversial. In February 2008 a proposal relating Na-Dene (excluding Haida) to the
Yeniseian languages of
Siberia was published and well received by a number of linguists.
The name
Edward Sapir originally constructed the term
Na-Dene to refer to the combined family of Athabaskan, Tlingit, and tentatively Haida. (The existence of Eyak was not known at the time.) In his “The Na-Dene languages: A preliminary report�, he describes how he arrived at the term (Sapir 1915, p. 558):
Family division
In its non-controversial core, Na-Dene consists of two branches, Tlingit and Athabaskan-Eyak:
Tlingit language: 700 speakers (Michael Krauss, 1995)
Athabaskan-Eyak
* Eyak language: extinct in 2008
* Athabaskan languages
** Northern
** Pacific Coast
** Southern
For linguists who follow Edward Sapir in connecting Haida to the above languages, the Haida isolate represents an additional branch, with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit together forming the other. Dene or Dine (the Athabaskan languages) is a widely distributed group of Native languages spoken by associated peoples in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Yukon, Alaska, parts of Oregon, northern California, and the American Southwest as far as northern Mexico. The southwestern division of Athabaskan is also called Southern Athabaskan or Apachean, and includes Navajo and all the Apache dialects. Eyak was spoken in south-central Alaska; the last speaker died in 2008. Navajo is by far the most widely spoken language of the Na-Dene family, spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, and other regions of the American Southwest.
Typological profile of Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
All of these languages share a highly complex prefixing verb structure in which tense and mood markers are interdigitated between subject and object agreement markers. The morphological hallmark of the family is a series of prefixes found directly before the verb root that raise or lower the transitivity of the verb word. These prefixes, traditionally known as "classifiers", derive historically from a combination of three distinct classes of morphemes and are not found in any other Native American language family.
The phoneme system contains a large number of guttural (velar or uvular) consonants (fronting in many modern Athabaskan languages to palatals and velars, correspondingly) as well as a general absence of labial obstruents (except where /b/ has arisen from *w). In the historical phonology there is a widespread tendency, observable across many Athabaskan languages, for phonemic tonal distinctions to arise from glottal features originally found at the end of the syllable. The glottal features in question are often evident in Eyak or Tlingit. These languages are typologically unusual in containing extensive prefixation yet being SOV and postpositional, features normally associated with suffixing languages.
Obstruent Correspondences
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! colspan=6 | Obstruent Correspondences
|-
! rowspan=2 | PAET || rowspan=2 | PAE || rowspan=2 |PA || rowspan=2 | Eyak || colspan=2 | Tlingit
|-
! Normal || L-assim.
|-
| d || d || d || d || d
|-
| t || t || t || t || t
|-
| tʼ || tʼ || tʼ || tʼ || tʼ
|-
| ɬ || ɬ || ɬ~l || ɬ || ɬ
|-
| tɬʼ || tɬʼ || tɬʼ || tɬʼ || ɬʼ, tɬʼ
|-
| s || s || s~z || s || s || ʃ
|-
| ts || ts || ts || ts || ts || tɬ
|-
| tsʼ || tsʼ || tsʼ || tsʼ || sʼ, tsʼ || tɬʼ, ɬ
|-
| ʃ || ʃ || Ê‚~Ê? || ʃ (s) || ʃ (s) || ɬ
|-
| dÊ’ || dÊ’ || dÊ’ || dÊ’ || dÊ’ || ?
|-
| tʃ || tʃ || tʃ || tʃ || tʃ (ts) || tɬ
|-
| tʃʼ || tʃʼ || tʃʼ || tʃʼ || sʼ, tʃʼ (tsʼ) || tɬʼ
|-
| xʲ || s || s~z || s; ʃ || x
|-
| gʲ || dz || [dz,] s~z || dz || g
|-
| kʲ || ts || ts || ts || k; ʃ
|-
| kʼʲ || tsʼ || tsʼ || tsʼ || kʼ
|-
| x || x || xʲ~j || x || x
|-
| g || g || gʲ || g || g(ʷ)
|-
| k || k || kʲ || k || k(ʷ)
|-
| kʼ || kʼ || kʼʲ || kʼ || xʼ(ʷ), kʼ(ʷ)
|-
| xÊ· || xÊ· || Ê‚~Ê? || xÊ· > x || x
|-
| gÊ· || gÊ· || É–Ê? || gÊ· > g || g(Ê·)
|-
| kʷ || kʷ || ʈʂ || kʷ > k || k(ʷ)
|-
| kʼʷ || kʼʷ || ʈʂʼ || kʼʷ > kʼ || xʼ(ʷ), kʼ(ʷ)
|-
| χ || χ || χ~Ê? || χ || χ(Ê·)
|-
| ɢ || ɢ || ɢ || ɢ || ɢ(ʷ)
|-
| q || q || q || q || q(Ê·)
|-
| qʼ || qʼ || qʼ || qʼ || χʼ(ʷ)
|-
| χʷ || χʷ || /χʷ/ > χ~Ê? || χʷ || χ(Ê·)
|-
| ɢʷ || ɢʷ || /ɢʷ/ > ɢ || ɢ || ɢ(ʷ)
|-
| qÊ· || qÊ· || /qÊ·/ > q || q || q(Ê·)
|-
| qʼʷ || qʼʷ || /qʼʷ/ > qʼ || qʼ || χʼ, qʼ(ʷ)
|-
! colspan=6 | Extrasystematic fricative correspondences
|-
| sx || x || xʲ~j || x || s
|-
| ʃx || x || xʲ~j || ʃ || ʃ
|-
| $ || x(ʷ) ? || $ (ʃ~xʲ) || xʷ > x; s || χ
|-
|}
Notes:
#PAET, PAE and PA stand for Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak and Proto-Athabaskan, respectively.
#To prevent cluttering the table, phonemes in the PAET, PAE and PA columns are not asterisked.
#Leer (2008, 2010) doesn't reconstruct the PAET affricates */dɮ/, */tɬ/ and */dz/. Judging from their rarity, he assumes they may be attributable to the resolution of former consonant clusters.
#In Athabaskan and Eyak, sibilants can be diminutive variants of shibilants. In Tlingit, on the other hand, shibilants might sometimes be diminutive variants of sibilants. These correspondences are in parentheses.
Proposals of deeper genealogical relations involving Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
A genealogical connection between the Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan languages was suggested early in the 19th century, but not universally accepted until much later.
Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally linked to Tlingit by
Franz Boas in 1894. Both Haida and Tlingit were then connected to Athabaskan by Edward Sapir in 1915. Linguists such as
Lyle Campbell (1997) today consider the evidence inconclusive. They have classified Haida as a
language isolate. In order to emphasise the exclusion of Haida, Campbell refers to the language family as
Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit rather than
Na-Dene. In 2010 Jeff Leer has published extensive primary materials on what he calls
PAET (Proto-Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit).
Dené-Yeniseian
Professor
Edward Vajda of
Western Washington University in 2008 presented compelling evidence that the Na-Dene languages (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) are related to
Yeniseian (or Yeniseic) languages of
Siberia, the only living representative of which is the
Ket language. Key evidence includes homologies in verb prefixes and also a systematic correspondence between the distribution of Ket tones and consonant articulations found in Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit. Prof. Vajda's paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages, including
Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer,
James Kari, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including
Bernard Comrie,
Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla,
Michael Fortescue, and
Eric Hamp. The conclusion of this seminar was that the comparison with Yeniseic data shows that Haida cannot be classified in a genealogical unit with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit.
Earlier proposals
According to
Joseph Greenberg's controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Na-Dené (including Haida as well as Athabaskan-Eyak + Tlingit) is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas. It represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The genealogical relationship of Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan is widely accepted, while the inclusion of Haida remains controversial. The other two families recognized by Greenberg for the Americas are the widely accepted
Eskimo-Aleut family, spoken in Siberia, Alaska, the
Canadian Arctic and
Greenland; and the far less widely accepted
Amerind, Greenberg's most controversial classification, which includes every language native to the Americas that is not Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dené.
Contemporary supporters of Greenberg's theory, such as Merritt Ruhlen, have suggested that the Na-Dené language family represents a distinct migration of people from Asia to the New World. Ruhlen claims this migration occurred six to eight thousand years ago, placing it around four thousand years later than the previous migration into the Americas by Amerind speakers. Ruhlen speculates that the Na-Dené speakers may have arrived in boats, initially settling near the Queen Charlotte Islands, now in British Columbia, Canada.
According to Sergei Starostin and his followers, Na-Dené (including Haida) belongs to the much broader Dene-Caucasian superfamily, which also contains the North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages and Basque. Some of the links subsumed by the Dene-Caucasian proposal were suggested much earlier. Linguist Edward Sapir considered the hypothesis that Sino-Tibetan is genealogically related to Na-Dene (including Haida) nearly a century ago.
See also
Athabaskan languages
Southern Athabaskan languages
Footnotes
References
External links
Table of contents and ordering information for The Dene-Yeniseian Connection.
Ethnologue.com: Language Family Trees - Na-Dene
Alaska Native Language Center
Athabaskan word comparison table
Dené-Yeniseian/Na-Dené Swadesh lists (incomplete)
Category:Dene-Yeniseian languages
Category:Indigenous languages of California
Category:Languages of North America
