The history of Tlingit is poorly known, mostly because there is no written record until the first contact with Europeans around the 1790s. Documentation was sparse and irregular until the early 20th century. The … See more

Tlingit is currently classified as a distinct and separate branch of Na-Dene, an indigenous language family of North America. Edward Sapir (1915) argued for its inclusion in the Na-Dené family, a claim that was subsequently debated by Franz Boas See more

Tlingit has a complex phonological system compared to Indo-European languages such as English or Spanish. It has an almost complete series of ejective consonants … See more

Until the late 1960s, Tlingit was written exclusively in phonetic transcription in the works of linguists and anthropologists except for a little-known Cyrillic alphabet used for … See more

The Tlingit language is distributed from near the mouth of the Copper River down the open coast of the Gulf of Alaska and throughout almost all of the islands of the Alexander Archipelago See more

Tlingit is divided into roughly five major dialects, all of which are essentially mutually intelligible:
• The Northern dialect is also called the Yakutat (Yakhwdaat) dialect, after its principal town and is spoken in an area south from See more

Tlingit grammar at first glance appears to be highly fusional, but this is an incorrect assumption. There are predictable processes by which … See more