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Wikipedia / Deg Xinag language

Deg Xinag (Deg Hitan) is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Deg Xitʼan peoples of the GASH region. The GASH region consists of the villages of Grayling, Anvik, Shageluk, and Holy Cross along the lower Yukon River in Interior Alaska. The language is severely endangered; out of an ethnic population of approximately 250 people, only 2 people still speak the language.

The language was referred to as Ingalik by Osgood (1936). While this term sometimes still appears in the literature, it is today considered pejorative. The word "Ingalik" is from the Yupʼik Eskimo language: , meaning "Indian".

(Their Stories of Long Ago), a collection of traditional folk tales in Deg Xinag by the elder Belle Deacon, was published in 1987 by the Alaska Native Language Center. A literacy manual with accompanying audiotapes was published in 1993.

Dialects

There are two main dialects: Yukon and Kuskokwim. The Yukon dialect (Yukon Deg Xinag, Yukon Ingalik) is the traditional language of the villages of the Lower Yukon River (Anvik, Shageluk and Holy Cross). As of 2009, there are no longer any speakers living in Anvik and Holy Cross. The other dialect (Kuskokwim Deg Xinag, Kuskokwim Ingalik) is the traditional language of the settlements of Middle Kuskokwim.

Phonology

Consonants

Here is the list of consonant sounds in Deg Xinag, including their pronunciation in IPA and their representations in Deg Xinag orthography in brackets:

Labial

Dental

Alveolar

Post-alveolar

Retroflex

Palatal

Velar

Uvular

Glottal

plain

sibilant

lateral

Plosive/Affricate

plain

aspirated

ejective

Fricative

voiceless

voiced

Sonorant

voiced

voiceless

glottalized

Consonants in Deg Xinag

In final position, consonant sounds are voiced as .

Vowels

Vowels in Deg Xinag are .

Front

Central

Back

Close

Close-mid

Mid

Open

Vocabulary

  • – airplane

  • – animal

  • – bear (lit. 'big animal')

  • – children

  • – day

  • – doctor, nurse

  • – fish

  • – dog

  • – my dog

  • – her dog

  • – mammoth

  • – doll (lit. 'little person')

  • – door

  • – earthquake

  • – my father

  • – her father

  • – house

  • – snow

  • – iron, metal

  • – mountain

  • – Indian ice cream

  • (in Anvik); niq'asrt'ay (in Shageluk) – fox

  • – in the morning

  • – Hello, how are you?

  • – one

  • – two

  • – three

  • – four

  • – eleven

References

Further reading

  • Hargus, Sharon. (2000). The Qualifier Prefixes in Yukon Deg Xinag (Ingalik). International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp.1–21.

  • Hargus, Sharon. (2008). Deg Xinag lateral affricates: Phonetic and historical perspectives. Poster presented at annual meeting of Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas, Chicago.

  • Kari, James. (1978). Deg Xinag (Ingalik) Noun Dictionary. Fairbanks, AK: Alaska Native Language Center.

  • Leonard, Beth R. (2007). Deg Xinag oral traditions: Reconnecting Indigenous language and education through traditional narratives (Doctoral dissertation).

  • Osgood, Cornelius. (1936). The Distribution of the Northern Athapaskan Indians. (Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 7). New Haven: Yale University.

  • Taff, Alice. (1997). Learning ancestral languages by telephone: Creating situations for language use [∗Ingalik; Telephone Conversation]. Teaching Indigenous Languages. Fairbanks: University of Alaska. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED415063.pdf.