Na-Dené languages
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Na-Dené (also Na-Dene, Nadene, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) is a Native American language family which includes the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit.
Family division
The Na-Dene family includes:
- Tlingit language: 700 speakers (M. Krauss, 1995)
- Athabaskan-Eyak
- * Eyak language: 1 speaker, (N. Barnes, 1996)
- * Athabaskan languages
- ** Northern
- ** Pacific Coast
- ** Southern
Genetic relation proposals
Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally included in the proposed family by Franz Boas. Most linguists today consider the evidence inconclusive and have classified it as a language isolate, however Joseph Greenberg reincluded Haida based on his mass lexical comparison research. To emphasise the exclusion of Haida the family is often termed Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit. The original Na-Dené proposal has been recently revived through the work of Haida linguist John Enrico.
According to Greenberg's controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Na-Dené-Athabaskan is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas, and represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The other two are the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family, spoken in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, and 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. The time of this migration is estimated to have been six to eight thousand years ago, placing it around four thousand later than the initial population of the continents 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. [link]
According to the similarly controversial theory of Sergei Starostin, Na-Dené is a member of the Dene-Caucasian superfamily, along with the North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages and Basque. This idea was considered by Edward Sapir. Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University suggests that these languages are related to Yeniseian (or Yeniseic) languages in Siberia, which would also support the controversial theory of Starostin and others.
References
- Dürr, Michael & Egon Renner. 1995. The history of the Na-Dene controversy: A sketch. Language and Culture in North America: Studies in Honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow, ed. by Egon Renner & Michael Dürr, 3-18. (Lincom Studies in Native American Linguistics 2). Munich: Lincom Europa.
- Enrico, John. 2004. Toward Proto–Na-Dene. Anthropological Linguistics 46(3).229-302.
- Krauss, Michael E. 1964. Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene: The phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics ?.118-36.
- Krauss, Michael E. 1965. Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene II: The morphology. International Journal of American Linguistics ?.18-28.
- Krauss, Michael E. 1973. Na-Dene. Linguistics in North America, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 903-78. (Current Trends in Linguistics 10). The Hague: Mouton.
- Levine, Robert D. 1979. Haida and Na-Dene: A new look at the evidence. International Journal of American Linguistics 45(2).157-70.
See also
External links
- Ethnologue.com: [Language Family Trees - Na-Dene]
- [Alaska Native Language Center]
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