The Gwichʼin language () belongs to the Athabaskan language family and is spoken by the Gwich'in First Nation (Canada) /

Alaska Native Alaska Natives (also known as Native Alaskans, Alaskan Indians, or Indigenous Alaskans) are the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples of Alaska that encompass a diverse arena of cultural and linguistic groups, including the I ...

People (United States). It is also known in older or dialect-specific publications as Kutchin, Takudh, Tukudh, or Loucheux. Gwich'in is spoken primarily in the towns of

Inuvik Inuvik (''place of man'') is the only town in the Inuvik Region, and the List of municipalities in the Northwest Territories, third largest community in Canada's Northwest Territories. Located in what is sometimes called the Beaufort Delta Re ...

Aklavik Aklavik (Inuvialuktun: ''Akłarvik'') (from the Inuvialuktun meaning '' barrenground grizzly place'') is a hamlet located in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. Until 1961, with a population over 1,500, the community served ...

Fort McPherson Fort McPherson was a U.S. Army military base located in Atlanta, Georgia, bordering the northern edge of the city of East Point, Georgia. It was the headquarters for the U.S. Army Installation Management Command, Southeast Region; the U.S. Ar ...

(aka ''Teetł'it Zheh)'', and

Tsiigehtchic Tsiigehtchic ( ; "mouth of the iron river"), officially the ''Hamlet of Tsiigehtchic'', is a Gwichʼin community located at the confluence of the Mackenzie River, Mackenzie and the Arctic Red Rivers, in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest Territor ...

(formerly Arctic Red River), all in the

Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is a federal Provinces and territories of Canada, territory of Canada. At a land area of approximately and a 2021 census population of 41,070, it is the second-largest and the most populous of Provinces and territorie ...

and

Old Crow Old Crow is a low-priced brand of Kentucky-made straight bourbon whiskey distilled by Suntory Global Spirits, which also produces Jim Beam and several other brands of whiskey. The current Old Crow product uses the same mash bill and yeast as ...

Yukon Yukon () is a Provinces and territories of Canada, territory of Canada, bordering British Columbia to the south, the Northwest Territories to the east, the Beaufort Sea to the north, and the U.S. state of Alaska to the west. It is Canada’s we ...

of Canada. In

Alaska Alaska ( ) is a non-contiguous U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. Part of the Western United States region, it is one of the two non-contiguous U.S. states, alongside Hawaii. Alaska is also considered to be the north ...

of the United States, Gwichʼin is spoken in

Fort Yukon Fort Yukon (''Gwichyaa Zheh'' in Gwich'in language, Gwich'in) is a city in the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska, Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area in the U.S. state of Alaska, straddling the Arctic Circle. The population, predominantly Gwich'in Alaska ...

, Chalkyitsik, Birch Creek,

Venetie Venetie ( ;Corey Goldberg," ''New York Times'', May 9, 1997. ''Vįįhtąįį'' in Gwich’in), is a census-designated place (CDP) in Yukon–Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska. At the 2010 census, the population was 166, down from 202 in 2000. It inc ...

and Arctic Village. The

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

in the name ''Gwichʼin'' is usually written with symbol , though the correct character for this use (with expected glyph and typographic properties) is .

Current status

According to the

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...

''Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger,'' Gwichʼin is at present severely endangered. There are about 260 Gwichʼin speakers in Canada out of a total Gwichʼin population of 1,900. About 300 out of a total Alaska Gwichʼin population of 1,100 speak the language. Gwichʼin speakers have been shifting from their

heritage language A heritage language is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a ...

to English as the

majority language A majority is more than half of a total; however, the term is commonly used with other meanings, as explained in the " Related terms" section below. It is a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements. For example, if a gr ...

of both the US and Canada.

Dialects

There are two main varieties of Gwichʼin, Eastern and Western, which are delineated roughly at the Canada–US border. There are several dialects within these subgroupings, including Fort Yukon Gwichʼin, Arctic Village Gwichʼin, Western Canada Gwichʼin (Takudh, Tukudh, Loucheux), and Arctic Red River. Each village has unique pronunciation features, vocabulary, and expressions. Inhabitants of

in the northern Yukon speak a similar dialect to those bands living in

and

Arctic Village, Alaska Arctic Village (''Vashrąįį K'ǫǫ'' in Gwich'in language, Gwich'in) is an unincorporated Alaska Natives, Native American village and a census-designated place (CDP) in Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska, Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area, Alaska, Unit ...

. Kâachik and Tâachik dialects are spoken in Johnson Creek village.

Language preservation and documentation

In 1988, the NWT Official Languages Act named Gwich'in an official language of the Northwest Territories, and the Official Languages of Alaska Law as amended declared Gwich'in a recognized language in 2014. The Gwich'in language is taught regularly at the Chief Zzeh Gittlit School in Old Crow, Yukon. Projects are underway to further document the language from a

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

standpoint, and foster the writing and translation skills of younger Gwich'in speakers. In one project, lead research associate and fluent speaker Gwichʼin elder Kenneth Frank works with linguists and young Gwich'in speakers affiliated with the

Alaska Native Language Center The Alaska Native Language Center, established in 1972 in Fairbanks, Alaska, is a research center focusing on the research and documentation of the Native languages of Alaska. It publishes grammars, dictionaries, folklore collections and research m ...

at the

University of Alaska The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF or Alaska) is a public land-, sea-, and space-grant research university in College, Alaska, United States, a suburb of Fairbanks. It is the flagship campus of the University of Alaska system. UAF was e ...

in Fairbanks to document traditional knowledge of caribou anatomy (Mishler and Frank 2020).

Residential schools and language decline

Assimilation efforts through residential schools played a factor in creating a cultural disruption and a language shift. One of the goals of residential schools was to wipe out indigenous culture and replace it with the European culture, seen as more conducive to “civilized” society. In the process, indigenous children were taken away from their families and placed in a dedicated school (“ Indian Schools” in the US). Indigenous children were often punished for speaking First-Nation languages, leading children to abandon their heritage languages. Residential schools caused major cultural disruption also among the Gwich’in.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of Gwichʼin are shown in

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation ** International Phonetic Association, the organization behind the alphabet * India pale ale, a style of beer * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA ...

notation below, with orthographic symbols in brackets:

Vowels

Gwich’in has six phonemic vowel qualities which contrast in duration, nasality, and tones.

Allophonic variation

Short vowels show different vowel qualities from their long counterparts * occurs as * occurs as * occurs as * occurs as * occurs as

Tone and nasality

* Nasal vowels are marked with an

ogonek The tail or ( ; Polish: , "little tail", diminutive of ) is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European languages, and directly under a vowel in several Native American langu ...

, e.g. ‹ą į ǫǫ› for /ə̃́ ɪ̃́ ṍː/, respectively. *

Low tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis ...

is marked with a grave accent, e.g. ''à whereas high tones are never marked.

Syllable structure

Gwichʼin has moderate complexity of

syllable structure A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

, in which the maximal syllable shape is CCVC. However, no consonant clusters occur within a syllable besides /Cj/ onsets, as in /ɬjə̃́h/ ''łyąh'' “hook”, or -/tʰjɛ̀ʔ/ -''tyèʼ'' “father” (i.e. /ʃɪ́tʰjɛ̀ʔ/ ''shityèʼ “''my father”). Word-medially, two-consonant sequences may occur. All consonants may occur syllable-initially (i.e. in onset position), but syllable-finally, no ejective, retroflex,

, interdental or labialized consonants occur. In coda-position, fricatives are also restricted to the glottal, lateral, and non-sibilant consonants.

Written Gwichʼin

The missionary Robert McDonald first started working on the written representation of Van Tat and Dagoo dialects Gwichʼin. He also produced a

Bible The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...

and a

hymn book A hymnal or hymnary is a collection of hymns, usually in the form of a book, called a hymnbook (or hymn book). They are used in congregational singing. A hymnal may contain only hymn texts (normal for most hymnals for most centuries of Christia ...

which was written in Gwichʼin in 1898. McDonald used English orthography as his model when representing Gwichʼin. This was unusual for missionaries at the time: other missionaries were translating the Bible from French into languages such as northern Slavey. After 1960, Wycliffe Bible translator Richard Mueller introduced a new modified spelling system. The purpose of his writing system was to better distinguish the sounds of the Gwichʼin language. Later on, Mueller's writing system was officially adopted by the

Yukon Territory Yukon () is a territory of Canada, bordering British Columbia to the south, the Northwest Territories to the east, the Beaufort Sea to the north, and the U.S. state of Alaska to the west. It is Canada’s westernmost territory and the smallest ...

. The new writing system helped expand the uses of the Gwichʼin language since speakers previously found the system for writing Gwichʼin less user friendly.

Grammar

Gwich’in is a highly

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

, head-marking language with extensive exclusive prefixal inflection. Word order is relatively flexible but generally follows a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb)

pattern A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated l ...

. The language exhibits

evidentiality In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particul ...

and verbal inflection that conveys aspectual distinctions rather than tense. Gwich’in uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Like other Athabaskan languages, Gwich’in has classifier prefixes in verbs that indicate transitivity and valency changes.

Verb configuration

A verb in Gwich’in contains a great number of smaller meaningful units or

morphemes A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

(e.g. in English ''un-spok-en'') that combine to give the verb its intended meaning. A verb is composed of the

stem Stem or STEM most commonly refers to: * Plant stem, a structural axis of a vascular plant * Stem group * Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Stem or STEM can also refer to: Language and writing * Word stem, part of a word respon ...

preceded by a varying number of

prefixes A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

, which in Gwich’in contain information about tense, aspect, and the number of people involved in the action. Unlike English verbs, which come with comparatively very little

derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a ...

and inflection (i.e. number of affixes), a Gwich’in verb is so rich in affixes that a single inflected and conjugated verb can correspond to whole sentences in English, as in (1).

In popular culture

In the

PBS Kids PBS Kids (stylized as PBS KIDS) is the branding used for nationally distributed children's programming carried by the U.S. public television network PBS. The brand encompasses a daytime block of children's programming carried daily by most PBS ...

television show

Molly of Denali ''Molly of Denali'' (stylized in all caps) is an animated children's television series produced by WGBH-TV, WGBH Kids and animated by Atomic Cartoons, created by Dorothea Gillim and Kathy Waugh for PBS Kids and CBC Kids.

, the main character Molly comes from a family of Gwich'in background, and therefore uses words in the Gwich'in language such as 'Mahsi' Choo' throughout the show. Molly shares her Gwich'in background with the show's creative producer, Princess Daazhraii Johnson.

References

External links

Gwich’in
Archived
Alaska Native Language Center: Gwichʼin
Portions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in Gwichʼin
Gwich'in Language Dictionary
2003, 4th Edition, prepared by the Gwich'in Social & Cultural Institute and the Gwich'in Language Centre, Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories (Canada); covers two dialects: Teetl'it Gwich'in (Fort McPherson) and Gwichyah Gwich'in (Tsiigehtchic)
Gwich'in Junior Dictionary/Dinjii zhuh ginjik nagwan tr'iłtsąįį
1979, compiled by Katherine Peter, Alaska Native Language Center {{DEFAULTSORT:Gwich'in Language Gwich'in Northern Athabaskan languages Indigenous languages of the North American Subarctic Indigenous languages of Alaska First Nations languages in Canada Official languages of Alaska