Tahltan
Tahltan (also Nahanni) refers to a Northern Athabaskan people that live in northern British Columbia around Telegraph Creek, Dease Lake, and Iskut.
Contents |
Culture
Language
Tahltan is a poorly documented Northern Athabaskan language. Some linguists consider Tahltan to be a language with 3 divergent but mutually intelligible dialects (Mithun 1999). The numbers below are according to Poser (2003):
- Tahltan (approximately 35 speakers)
- Kaska (approximately 400 speakers)
- Tagish (approximately 2 speakers)
Other linguists consider these to be separate languages.
Sounds
Consonants
The 45 consonants of Tahltan:
| Bilabial | Interdental | Dental | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | lateral | plain | labial | ||||||||
| Stop | unaspirated | p | t | k | kʷ | q | |||||
| aspirated | kʰ | kʷʰ | qʰ | ||||||||
| ejective | k’ | k’ʷ | q’ | ʔ | |||||||
| Affricate | unaspirated | tθ | ʦ | tɬ | ʧ | ||||||
| aspirated | tθʰ | ʦʰ | tɬʰ | ʧʰ | |||||||
| ejective | tθ’ | ʦ’ | tɬ’ | ʧ’ | |||||||
| Nasal | plain | m | n | ||||||||
| glottalized | n’ | ||||||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | θ | s | ɬ | ʃ | ç | x | xʷ | χ | h | |
| voiced | ð | z | ɮ | ʒ | ɣ | ɣʷ | ʁ | ||||
| Approximant | j | w | |||||||||
Vowels
Phonological processes
- Vowel flattening.
- Consonant harmony
- Vowel nasalization
- Vowel laxing
External links
- map of Northwest Coast First Nations (including Tahltan)
Bibliography
- Cook, Eung-Do. (1972). Stress and related rules in Tahltan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 38, 231-233.
- Gafos, Adamantios. (1999). The articulatory basis of locality in phonology. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-8153-3286-6. (Revised version of the author's Doctoral dissertation, John Hopkins University).
- Hardwick, Margaret F. (1984). Tahltan phonology and morphology. (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Toronto, Ontario).
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Nater, Hank. (1989). Some comments on the phonology of Tahltan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 55, 25-42.
- Poser, William J. (2003). The status of documentation for British Columbia native languages. Yinka Dene Language Institute Technical Report (No. 2). Vanderhoof, British Columbia: Yinka Dene Language Institute.
- Shaw, Patricia. (1991). Consonant harmony systems: The special status of coronal harmony. In C. Paradis & J.-F. Prunet (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology 2, the special status of coronals: Internal and external evidence (pp. 125-155). London: Academic Press.
Categories
Northern Athabaskan languages | Endangered languages | Indigenous languages of the North American Subarctic | Languages of Canada