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Language Lineage

Tlingit

The most distant member of the family, with a consonant system rich in uvulars and ejectives and a tone system of its own.

Several thousand years ago – presentThe Alaskan panhandle and adjacent British Columbia and Yukon
On this page
  1. Lingít
  2. Oral Literature
  3. In its own words
  4. Where it's spoken
  5. Turning points

01

Lingít

Tlingit (Lingít) is spoken along the islands and fjords of southeast Alaska. It has more than forty consonants, including a full series of ejectives and uvulars, and very few vowels. It developed tone independently of the Athabaskan languages.

Russian traders and the Russian-American Company reached Tlingit country in the late 18th century, and fought with the Tlingit at Sitka in 1802 and 1804. After the United States bought Alaska in 1867, boarding schools and mission schools punished children for speaking the language. Today the fluent first-language speakers are mostly elderly, but there are active programmes, including language classes and immersion camps, a large body of recorded oral literature, and a practical alphabet developed in the 1960s.

02

Oral Literature

Tlingit has one of the best-published oral literatures of any Native North American language. Stories, speeches and songs belong to particular clans as at.óow, 'owned things', together with crests, names and regalia, and are performed at memorial gatherings often called potlatches. Oratory at these events answers grief with a formal exchange of speeches that draw on clan histories and images of the land and sea.

From the 1970s the Tlingit scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer and her husband Richard Dauenhauer recorded elders, transcribed their words in the practical alphabet and published them with facing English translations and detailed notes. Their series Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature includes Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors (1987), a collection of narratives, Haa Tuwunáagu Yís, for Healing Our Spirit (1990), a collection of oratory, and Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture (1994), life histories of elders. The books were designed for use by the community as much as by outside readers, and they are now standard materials in Tlingit language teaching.

Earlier collections exist too, notably the texts gathered by John R. Swanton in 1904, published in 1909. The modern editions differ in giving the Tlingit text in full, so that the language of the performance, not only its content, is preserved.

A sample

In its own words

Tlingit

Wáa sá iyatee?
Wáa
how
sá
Q
iyatee?
2SG.be
‘How are you?’
Sources (1)

On the map

Where it’s spoken

Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. United Statesfewer than 100
  2. Canadaa few dozen

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Contact1799 – 1867

    Russian America

    The Russian-American Company establishes posts at Sitka. The Tlingit destroy the first fort in 1802 and lose the battle of 1804. Russian traders and clergy leave some loanwords, and after 1867 the language faces English-only schooling under American rule.

    Sources (1)
    • Dauenhauer, Nora Marks, Richard Dauenhauer & Lydia T. Black, eds. 2008. Anóoshi Lingít Aaní Ká / Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
  2. Writing1960s

    A practical alphabet

    Constance Naish and Gillian Story develop the Latin-based orthography that, with later revisions, is used in Tlingit teaching materials and in the Dauenhauers' editions of Tlingit oral literature.

    Sources (1)
    • Dauenhauer, Nora Marks & Richard Dauenhauer, eds. 1987. Haa Shuká, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives. Seattle: University of Washington Press.