In the past, this language family was simply known as the Athabaskan language family, which is the name recognized by most speakers of these languages (the spelling "Athabascan" is more preferred today, but both spellings are still commonly used, and "Athapaskan" can occasionally be seen as well.) For the remainder of this article, the conventional three-way geographic grouping will be followed except as noted.Branches 1–7 are the Northern Athabaskan (areal) grouping.
The urheimat of the Athabaskan family is most likely in the Tanana Valley of east-central Alaska. Leer also adopted the argument advanced by Keren Rice (1997) that there was no need to distinguish between *y and *žʸ.
In Athabaskan languages, it usually has a reflex of /š/, the alveolar fricative, but in Eyak it appears as /x/ and in Tlingit as /χ/. Despite this inadequacy, current comparative Athabaskan literature demonstrates that most Athabaskanists still use the three-way geographic grouping rather than any of the proposed linguistic groupings given below, because none of them has been widely accepted. For example, AET languages all contain ejective, or popping, consonants, while Eskimo-Aleut languages do not.
The Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis was examined publically at a seminal symposium in Februrary 2008.
Another innovation from Kari is the use of angle brackets to mark epenthetic segments, a convention which is not often used even by Kari himself.Linguists conventionally divide the Athabaskan family into three groups, based on geographic distribution:The internal structure of the Athabaskan language family is complex, and its exact shape is still a hotly debated issue among experts. Languages related in this way often share many resemblances, just as do people descended from a common ancestor. The word Athabaskan is an anglicized version of a Cree language name for Lake Athabasca (Woods Cree: Aδapaska˙w “[where] there are reeds one after another”) in Canada. The Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language family is also known as the Nadene, Na-Dené, and Tlina–Dene languages. He encountered tone in Tlingit in 1914 when working with Louis Shotridge, a student and consultant of Franz Boas, with whom Sapir described the minimal pair /qáːt/ «crippled» and /qaːt/ «sockeye salmon». The other dimension is the «D-effect», surfacing as the presence or absence of either vocalization or an alveolar stop.The reconstruction of tone is an issue of major importance in Athabaskan language studies, as well as for the wider historical linguistics field. The conventional three-way split into Northern, Pacific Coast, and Southern is essentially based on geography and the physical distribution of Athabaskan peoples rather than sound linguistic comparisons. Unfortunately, the inapplicability of standard historical linguistic methods has led many to speculate as to possible long-distance relationships beyond Eskimo-Aleut and AET.Many other distant relationships have been proposed for AET. Dena’ina, like many other Alaska languages, is polysynthetic, meaning a whole sentence can be expressed with just one word.
Furthermore, the rules of word formation are completely different in the two families. The resulting system is somewhat simpler than the traditional one, with 8 fewer phonemes.The following list gives the Athabaskan languages organized by their geographic location in various North American states and provinces (including some languages that are now extinct). Details of the Athabaskan family tree should be regarded as tentative. Tsimshian is related to three other languages in Canada that together form the Tsimshianic family. Today the term also refers to the language spoken by eleven groups of Alaska Native. Hoijer’s proposal is missing several elements which were described in detail later, but Kibrik’s is not terribly different from Rice’s.
Michael Krauss’s unpublished manuscript on Athabaskan tone (1979) circulated for decades before being published (2005), and has become the basis for all discussion of Athabaskan tonology. Leer 2008).
by Gary Holton. Of course, just as unrelated people may look alike, languages may be similar without being related throug… Koyukon. The word Athabaskan is an anglicized version of a Cree language name for Lake Athabasca (Template:Lang-crm “[where] there are reeds one after another”) in Canada. While it will be some years before the proposal can be fully evaluated by scholars, many prominent experts in AET languages have received the proposal favorably (having soundly rejected previous proposals for distant genetic relationships).