Оңтүстік Аляска мен Батыс Канаданың Тлингит тілі

Na Dene language of southeast Alaska and western Canada

The Tlingit language (/lang//audio=Tlingit English pronunciation. mp3/'/k//l//ɪ//ŋ//k//ɪ//t/ KLINGkit; Lingít ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada and is a branch of the Na Dene language family. Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and culture. Missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church were the first to develop a written version of Tlingit by using the Cyrillic script to record and translate it when the Russian Empire had contact with Alaska and the coast of North America down to Sonoma County, California. After the Alaska Purchase, English speaking missionaries from the United States developed a written version of the language with the Latin alphabet.

The history of Tlingit is poorly known, mostly because there is no written record until the first contact with Europeans around the 1790s. Documentation was 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 Na Dene, an indigenous language family of North America. Edward Sapir (1915) argued for its inclusion in the Na Dené family, a claim that was subsequently debated by Franz Boas (1917), P. E. Goddard (1920), and many other prominent linguists of the time. Studies in the late 20th century by (Heinz )Jürgen Pinnow (1962, 1968, 1970, int. al.) and Michael E. Krauss (1964, 1965, 1969, int. al.) showed a strong connection to Eyak and hence to the Athabaskan languages. Sapir initially proposed a connection between Tlingit and Haida, but the debate over Na Dene gradually excluded Haida from the discussion. Haida is now considered an isolate, with some borrowing from its long proximity with Tlingit. In 2004, the Haida linguist John Enrico presented new arguments and reopened the debate. Victor Golla writes in his 2011 California Native Languages, "John Enrico, the contemporary linguist with the deepest knowledge of Haida, continues to believe that a real, if distant, genetic relationship connects Haida to Na Dene[.]"

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 dialects, but they are mostly mutually intelligible. Almost all of the area where the Tlingit language is endemic is contained within the modern borders of Alaska. The exception is an area known as "Inland Tlingit" that extends up the Taku River and into northern British Columbia and the Yukon around Atlin Lake (Áa Tleen "Big Lake") and Teslin Lake (Desleen < Tas Tleen "Big Thread") lake districts, as well as a concentration around Bennett Lake at the end of the Chilkoot Trail (Jilkhoot). Otherwise, Tlingit is not found in Canada. Tlingit legend tells that groups of Tlingit once inhabited the Stikine, Nass, and Skeena river valleys during their migrations from the interior. There is a small group of speakers (some 85) in Washington as well.

Golla (2007) reported a decreasing population of 500 speakers in Alaska. The First Peoples' Cultural Council (2014) reported 2 speakers in Canada out of an ethnic population of 400. As of 2013, Tlingit courses are available at the University of Alaska Southeast. In April 2014, Alaska HB 216 recognized Tlingit as an official language of Alaska, lending support to language revitalization.

Tlingit has a complex phonological system compared to Indo European languages such as English or Spanish. It has an almost complete series of ejective consonants accompanying its stop, fricative, and affricate consonants. The only missing consonant in the Tlingit ejective series is The language is also notable for having several laterals but no voiced and for having no labials in most dialects, except for and in recent English loanwords.

Until the late 1960s, Tlingit was 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 and so 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 that feature accuracy and consistency but sacrifice 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 other is that most transcriptions made before Boas's study of Tlingit have numerous mistakes in them, particularly because of misinterpretations of the short vowels and ejective consonants. Accuracy of transcription can be increased by checking against similar words in other systems, or against a modern work postdating Naish and Story's work in the 1960s.

Tlingit grammar at first glance appears to be highly fusional, but this is an incorrect assumption. There are predictable processes by which the basic phonetic shapes of individual morphemes are modified to fit various phonological requirements. These processes can be described with a regular language, and such descriptions are given here on a per morpheme basis by giving rule schemas for the context sensitive phonological modification of base morphemes. Analyzing all the possible combinations of morphemes and phonological contexts in Tlingit and constructing a regular language to describe them is a daunting but tractable task. Despite not being a fusional language, Tlingit is still highly synthetic as an agglutinating language, and is even polysynthetic to some extent. The verb, as with all the Na Dené languages, is characteristically incorporating. Nouns are in comparison relatively simple, with many being derived from verbs.

Tlingit word order is SOV when non pronominal agent and object phrases both exist in the sentence. However, there is a strong urge to restrict the argument of the verb phrase to a single non pronominal noun phrase, with any other phrases being extraposed from the verb phrase. If a noun phrase occurs outside of the verb phrase then it is typically represented in the verb phrase by an appropriate pronoun.

The subject pronominals are all incorporated into the verb. Thus when the subject is represented as a pronominal, the subject position of the sentence is empty.

Object pronominals are divided into three classes, the verbal, nominal, and postpositional. The verbal object pronominals function similarly to the subject pronominals in that they preclude an explicit object when used. The nominal object pronominals are similar in some respects to the possessive pronouns of English. They precede a noun and represent the object of the noun, typically implying possession of the noun. Postpositional object pronominals function as objects to which postpositions are attached. They act as the object of a postposition in a manner similar to an ordinary noun suffixed with a postposition.

Particles function as neither noun nor verb. They are restricted to positions relative to phrases in the sentence.

The Irish TV series An Klondike (2015–17), set in Canada in the 1890s, contains Tlingit dialogue. The American comedy drama Northern Exposure contains Tlingit dialogue. In 2023, the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes (Tlingit & Haida) announced the release of the first of nine Tlingit language children's books and animated videos. As a collaborative effort between Tlingit & Haida, the Goldbelt Heritage Foundation, Cedar Group, and illustrators Kelsey Mata and Nick Alan Foote, the project is funded under a three year grant through the United States Department of Education's Alaska Native Education Program. The first book is titled Kuhaantí (2023) and has set release date of October 27, 2023.