Na-Dené languages

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(Redirected from Na-Dene)

Na-Dené (also Na-Dene, Nadene, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) is a Native American language family which includes the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit.

1 Family division
2 Genetic relation proposals
3 See also
4 External links

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

Navajo is the most widely spoken language of the Na-Dené family, spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, and other regions of the American Southwest. Dene or Dine is a widely distributed group of Native languages and peoples spoken in Canada, Alaska, and parts of Oregon and northern California. Eyak is spoken in the Alaskan panhandle and today there is only one speaker left.

Genetic relation proposals

Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), has been proposed to be a part of the Na-Dené family, but most linguists consider the evidence inconclusive and classify it as a language isolate.

According to Joseph Greenberg's highly 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 Eskimo-Aleut, 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. [1]

According to the (also controversial) linguistic theory of Sergei Starostin, Na-Dene is a member of the Dene-Caucasian superfamily, along with the North Caucasian languages and Sino-Tibetan languages. 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.