Hän language

The Hän language (alternatively spelled as Haen) (also known as Dawson, Han-Kutchin, Moosehide) is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Hän Hwëch'in (translated to ''people who live along the river'', sometimes anglicized as ''Hankutchin''). Athabascan refers to the interrelated complexity of languages spoken in Canada and Alaska each with its own dialect: the village of Eagle, Alaska in the United States and the town of Dawson City, Yukon Territory in Canada, though there are also Hän speakers in the nearby city of Fairbanks, Alaska. Furthermore, there was a decline in speakers in Dawson City as a result of the influx of gold miners in the mid-19th century.

Hän is in the Northern Athabaskan subgrouping of the Na-Dené language family. It is most closely related to Gwich'in and Upper Tanana.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of Hän are listed below with IPA notation on the left, the standard orthography in :

Vowels

Nasal vowels are marked orthographically in Hän, and all of the monophthong vowels can be either oral or nasal. Nasal vowels are written with a ogonek, small tail (akin to the Polish ) at the bottom of the vowel, so, for instance, nasal is written as .

Revitalization

There are about a dozen people, all elderly, who speak Hän as their native language, though there is a growing second-language speaker community.

The Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation, Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in (formerly known as the Dawson First Nation) in the Yukon Territory support the revitalization of Hän, and there are current efforts to revive the language locally. There is an effort to promote traditional skills and finding a balance between the way of the newcomer's which further promotes the development and revitalization of the language. As of April 2024, the last fluent speaker of Hän in Yukon, a 96-year-old elder, died.

Since 1991, the Robert Service School in Dawson City has hosted the Hän Language program, and the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in supports adult language classes and bi-annual cultural gatherings.

There are many other resources used to learn Hän, particularly online ones such as, FirstVoices and Yukon Native Learning Centre. These online learning language tools teach the tradition, culture, history, and the language of Hän.

Further reading

* Manker, Jonathan, and Tsuu T’ina Nation (2013). ''The Syntax of Sluicing in Hän''. Dene Languages Conference, Calgary, Alberta.
* Manker, Jonathan (2014). ''Tone Specification and the Tone-Bearing Unit (TBU) in Hän Athabascan''. WSLCA 19 St. John's, Newfoundland.
* O’Leary, M. (2017) ''The Interaction of Wh-movement and Topicalization in Hän''. ''2016 Dene Language Conference Proceedings,'' 81–88.
* Lehman, S. B. & O’Leary, M. (2019). ''Unexpected Athabaskan Pronouns''. In Margit Bowler, Philip T. Duncan, Travis Major, Harold Torrence (eds.), ''UCLA Working Papers: Schuhschrift: Papers in Honor of Russell Schuh'', 122–137.

Notes

References

* Alaska Native Language Center
Alaska Native Language Center
(accessed July 24, 2005).
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .

External links

Hän alphabet
* Alaska Native Language Center

* Yukon Native Language Centre
Hän


The Endangered Languages Project: Han

{{DEFAULTSORT:Han Language
Hän
Northern Athabaskan languages
Indigenous languages of the North American Subarctic
Indigenous languages of Alaska
First Nations languages in Canada
Languages of the United States
Endangered Dené–Yeniseian languages
Official languages of Alaska