Tlingit Language - Dialects

Dialects

Tlingit is divided into roughly five major dialects, all of which are essentially mutually intelligible:

• The northernmost dialect is called the Yakutat (Yakhwdaat) dialect, after its principal town. The Northern dialect is spoken in an area south from Lituya Bay (Litu.aa) to Frederick Sound.
• The Transitional dialect, which is a two-tone dialect like the Northern, but which has phonological features of the Southern, is historically spoken in the villages of Petersburg (Gántiyaakw Séedi “Steamboat Canyon”), Kake (Khéixh' “Daylight”), and Wrangell (Khaachxhana.áak'w “Khaachxhan’s Little Lake”), and in the surrounding regions, although it has almost disappeared.
• The similarly moribund Southern dialects of Sanya and Heinya are spoken from Sumner Strait south to the Alaska-Canada border, excepting Annette Island, which is the reservation of the Tsimshian people, and the southern end of Prince of Wales Island which is the land of the Kaigani Haida (K'aayk'aani).
• The Inland Tlingit dialect is spoken in Canada around Atlin Lake and Teslin Lake.
• The Tongass Tlingit dialect was once spoken in the Cape Fox area south of Ketchikan, but recently died with its last speakers in the 1990s.

The various dialects of Tlingit can be classified roughly into two-tone and three-tone systems. The tone values in two-tone dialects can be predicted in some cases from the three-tone values, but not the reverse. This fact led to the hypothesis that the three-tone dialects were older and that the two-tone dialects evolved from them.

But, Jeff Leer’s discovery of the Tongass dialect in the late 1970s upset this proposal of linguistic evolution. In place of tone, Tongass Tlingit features a four-way contrast between short, long, glottalized, and fading vowels. (“Fading” here means that the onset of the vowel is articulated normally but the release is murmured, essentially a rapid opening of the glottis once articulation is begun.) Further research showed that the Tongass vowel system was adequate to predict the tonal features of both the two-tone and three-tone dialects, but that none of the tonal dialects could be used to predict vocalic feature distribution in Tongass Tlingit. Thus Tongass Tlingit is the most conservative of the various dialects of Tlingit, preserving contrasts which have been lost in the other dialects.

The similarity of fading and glottalized vowels between Tongass Tlingit and Coastal Tsimshian led to ideas that the two could be related. But, Krauss and Leer (1981, p. 165) point out that the fading vowels in Coastal Tsimshian are the surface realization of underlying sequences of vowel and glottalized sonorant, i.e. VʔC. This is in contradistinction to the glottal modifications in Tongass Tlingit which Leer argues are symmetric with the modifications of the consonantal system. Thus a fading vowel V̤ is symmetric with an aspirated consonant Cʰ, and a glottalized vowel Vʔ is symmetric with an ejective (glottalized) consonant Cʼ. This implies that the two systems are only coincidentally similar and have no familial relationship. Leer (1978) speculated that the maintenance of the pretonal system in Tongass Tlingit was caused by the proximity of its speakers around the Cape Fox area near the mouth of the Portland Canal to Coastal Tsimshian speakers just to the south.