Na-Dene (also Nadene, Na-Déné, etc., pronounced /ˌnɑːdɨˈneɪ/, and Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial. In February 2008 a proposal relating Na-Dene (excluding Haida) to the Yeniseian languages of Siberia was published and well received by a number of linguists.
Edward Sapir originally constructed the term...
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Na-Dene (also Nadene, Na-Déné, etc., pronounced /ˌnɑːdɨˈneɪ/, and Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial. In February 2008 a proposal relating Na-Dene (excluding Haida) to the Yeniseian languages of Siberia was published and well received by a number of linguists.
Edward Sapir originally constructed the term Na-Dene to refer to the combined family of Athabaskan, Tlingit, and tentatively Haida. (The existence of Eyak was not known at the time.) In his “The Na-Dene languages: A preliminary report” he describes how he arrived at the term (Sapir 1915, p. 558):
In its non-controversial core, Na-Dene consists of two branches, Tlingit and Athabaskan-Eyak:
For linguists who follow Edward Sapir in connecting Haida to the above languages, the Haida isolate represents an additional branch, with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit together forming the other. Dene or...
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