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| Anthropology and Archaeology at Yukon College |
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Yukon College Anthropology Home Page Chisana River Basin Ethnohistory Montague Harbour Underwater Archaeology Locarno Beach Paleoshoreline Investigations Discussion Membership
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Athapaskan Languages of the RegionAthapaskan is used to designate a family of related indigenous North American languages spoken in the Western Subarctic. There are also smaller groups of this language family found on the northwest and southwest Pacific coast, as well as the interior American southwest (Apachean languages). Most Athapaskan speakers refer to themselves as Dineh, or some cognate variant, which translates as "the people." Within the Chisana Ethnohistory Project's study region are found aboriginal people who speak three different Athapaskan languages: Upper Tanana, Ahtna, and Tanacross. The intent of this page is to provide a brief overview of some characteristic features of the Athapaskan language and more detailed information on the three specific languages spoken in the study region. There is also a link to a page which reviews some Basic Principles of Linguistics. Here is a link to the Yukon Native Language Centre ,one to the Alaska Native Language Center ,and one about Athapaskan Languages in Alaska
General Characteristics of Athapaskan LanguagesThe subarctic Athapaskan languages comprise 23 distinct languages, between which there is no mutual intelligibility, and considerably more dialects throughout the region.The distribution of Athapaskan languages proper is continuous through the subarctic, but discontinuous through North America - that is there is found a number of Athapaskan subgroups which are isolated from Northern or subarctic athapaskan - two groups along the Pacific coast (Pacific Coast Athapaskan and Kwalhioqua-Tlatskanai) and one within the circum-Pueblo southwest and adjacent plains (Apachean). Unlike the case for Algonquian, Athapaskan linguistic relationships cannot be adequately described in terms of discrete family-tree branches. This is because intergroup communication has ordinarily been constant, and no northern Athapaskan language or dialect has ever been completely isolated from the others for very long. This characteristic can be illustrated by examining the distribution of phonological, morphological, and lexical features, which display some areal distribution. Here, for example is a graphic representation of the development of northern Athapaskan vowel systems, which displays the overlapping of these innovations - i.e., most innovations are displayed by contiguous languages. Compare this with the development of northern Athapaskan tone systems, which disply a discontinuous distribution in the innovations - i.e., there is much less continuity between the nature of the tone systems. What do these distributions tell us? That there is no coherent and consistent differentiation to be made between groups; depending on the characteristic chosen we can link groups differently. Thus for northern Athapaskan it is relatively useless to search for the kinds of extensive correalations which serve to develope historical relationships between "subgroups" and an assumed prototype. This is not to say that historical relationships cannot be developed or inferred for the northern Athapaskan language as a whole. The application of several principles of historical linguistics can lead us to several statements of note:
Naming the Landscape - "Wisdom Sits in Places"A place that is named carries a complex symbolic capacity. Its name may arise from an historical event but the name is remembered less for the event itself as for its contemporary meaning in the construction of local identity and sense of place. As Basso (1996:7) notes:
Long before the advent of literacy, to say nothing of history as an academic discipline, places served human kind as durable symbols of distant events and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them - and this convenient arrangment, ancient but not outmoded , is with us still today. In modern landscapes every where, people persist in asking "What happened here?" The answers they supply . . . should not be taken lightly, for what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth, and while the two activities may be seperable in principle, they are deeply joined in practice. If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a venerable means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions and, in the process, personal and social identities. We are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine. Basso has also discussed the means by which place names can evoke not only history but complex moral positions, as the stories related to space are embodied in the name itself, an observation which both Julie Cruikshank and myself have made among subarctic Dineh proper. Readings
Reference Material
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