Difference between revisions of "User:Ekenast1/Language selection"

Latest revision as of 01:40, 23 January 2022

Elliot Kenaston Language Selection

I am interested in doing my project on an Alaska Native language.

Choice 1: Inupiaq

ISO 639-3, ipk

Inupiaq is a polysynthetic language, so the words can be very long and be highly inflected. Words themselves consist of one of three stems which gives meaning to the word, as well as one or more endings that can give many different attributes.

Inupiaq is split into two main dialects, Seward Peninsula Inupiaq which is spoken on the Seward Peninsula, and Northern Alaskan Inupiaq which is spoken in northern Alaska and east into Canada. In total, there are about 3,000 native speakers in Alaska, and most of the speakers are over 40 years old. There is transmission to younger people, but not enough to sustain the language for a long time. Inupiaq only became written down when explorers began interacting with native languages, and the current written alphabet is in Latin script. I will be able to find pages of text of Inupiaq, it is not too uncommon.

Alaska Native Language Center, Ethnologue, Wikipedia

Choice 2: Tanana Athabascan

ISO 639-3, taa

Tanana Athabascan or Lower Tanana is a very endangered language spoken almost exclusively in Minto village in central Alaska. I am not certain as I couldn't find it written anywhere, but from looking at some words it appears to by polysynthetic like Inupiaq. There are only around 30 people who still speak the language, with the youngest being around 60 and it is not being significantly transmitted. Tanana also was not a written language until explorers interacted with it, so the written alphabet is in Latin script. Even though there are so few speakers, there has been an effort to preserve the language, so I will be able to find some text in Tanana. At the very least I know that a pocket dictionary exists for the language.

Alaska Native Language Center, Ethnologue, Wikipedia

Choice 3: Tlingit

ISO 639-3, tli

Tlingit is a language spoken in southeastern Alaska from Yakutak down to Ketchikan. I am not super confident with the morphology characterization, but I found that Tlingit has been characterized as an agglutinative language but still highly synthetic.

There are roughly 500 speakers of the language, and there is a lot of effort being put towards preserving the language and there are Tlingit courses offered at the University of Alaska Southeast. When Russian missionaries interacted with the language, it was written down in Cyrillic and until the 1960s, it was only written in phonetic transcription by linguists. Since then it has been written in Latin script. I am confident I will be able to find written examples of this language, as there are collections of old legends and stories by Tlingit elders as well as verb and noun dictionaries.

Alaska Native Language Center, Ethnologue, Wikipedia,,,