Haida language
Haida /ˈhaɪdə/[2] (X̱aat Kíl, X̱aadas Kíl, X̱aayda Kil, Xaad kil[3]) is the language of the Haida people, spoken in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of Canada and on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. An endangered language, Haida currently has 24 native speakers, though revitalization efforts are underway. At the time of the European arrival at Haida Gwaii in 1774, it is estimated that Haida speakers numbered about 15,000. Epidemics soon led to a drastic reduction in the Haida population, which became limited to three villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg. Positive attitudes towards assimilation combined with the ban on speaking Haida in residential schools led to a sharp decline in the use of the Haida language among the Haida people, and today almost all ethnic Haida use English to communicate.
Haida
13 (2018, 2020)[1]
Classification of the Haida language is a matter of controversy, with some linguists placing it in the Na-Dené language family and others arguing that it is a language isolate. Haida itself is split between Northern and Southern dialects, which differ primarily in phonology. The Northern Haida dialects have developed pharyngeal consonants, typologically uncommon sounds which are also found in some of the nearby Salishan and Wakashan languages.
The Haida sound system includes ejective consonants, glottalized sonorants, contrastive vowel length, and phonemic tone. The nature of tone differs between the dialects, and in Alaskan Haida it is primarily a pitch accent system. Syllabic laterals appear in all dialects of Haida, but are only phonemic in Skidegate Haida. Extra vowels which are not present in Haida words occur in nonsense words in Haida songs. There are a number of systems for writing Haida using the Latin alphabet, each of which represents the sounds of Haida differently.
While in Haida nouns and verbs behave as clear word classes, adjectives form a subclass of verbs. Haida has only a few adpositions. Indo-European-type adjectives translate into verbs in Haida, for example 'láa "(to be) good", and English prepositional phrases are usually expressed with Haida "relational nouns", for instance Alaskan Haida dítkw 'side facing away from the beach, towards the woods'. Haida verbs are marked for tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, and person is marked by pronouns that are cliticized to the verb. Haida also has hundreds of classifiers. Haida has the rare direct-inverse verbal alignment where instead of nominal cases, it is marked whether the grammatical subject and object follow or not a hierarchy between persons and noun classes. Haida also has obligatory possession, where certain types of nouns cannot stand alone and require a possessor.
Classification[edit]
Franz Boas first suggested that Haida might be genetically related to the Tlingit language in 1894, and linguist Edward Sapir included Haida in the Na-Dené language family in 1915.[22] This position was later supported by others, including Swanton, Pinnow, and Greenberg and Ruhlen.[22] Today, however, many linguists regard Haida as a language isolate.[23] This theory is not universally accepted; for example, Enrico (2004) argues that Haida does in fact belong to the Na-Dené family, though early loanwords make the evidence problematic.[22] A proposal linking Na-Dené to the Yeniseian family of central Siberia finds no evidence for including Haida.[24]
Dialects[edit]
Haida has a major dialectal division between Northern and Southern dialects.[4] Northern Haida is split into Alaskan (or Kaigani) Haida and Masset (or North Graham Island) Haida.[4] Southern Haida was originally split into Skidegate Haida and Ninstints Haida, but Ninstints Haida is now extinct and is poorly documented.[4] The dialects differ in phonology and to some extent vocabulary; however, they are grammatically mostly identical.[15]
Northern Haida is notable for its pharyngeal consonants.[25] Pharyngeal consonants are rare among the world's languages, even in North America.[26] They are an areal feature of some languages in a small portion of Northwest America, in the Salishan and Wakashan languages as well as Haida.[25] The pharyngeal consonants of Wakashan and Northern Haida are known to have developed recently.[25]
First orthography[edit]
Several orthographies have been devised for writing Haida. The first alphabet was devised by the missionary Charles Harrison[53] of the Church Mission Society who translated some Old Testament Stories in the Haida Language,[54] and some New Testament books. These were published by the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Haida Gospel of Matthew in 1891,[55] Haida Gospel of Luke in 1899[56] and the Haida Gospel of John in 1899,[57] and the book of Acts in Haida in the 1890s.
Grammar[edit]
Morphology[edit]
The word classes in Haida are nouns, verbs, postpositions, demonstratives, quantifiers, adverbs, clitics, exclamations, replies, classifiers, and instrumentals.[64] Unlike in English, adjectives and some words for people are expressed with verbs, e.g. jáada "(to be a) woman", 'láa "(to be) good".[65] Haida morphology is mostly suffixing.[66] Prefixation is only used to form "complex verbs", made up of a nominal classifier or instrumental plus a bound root, for instance Skidegate sq'acid "pick up stick-object" and ts'icid "pick up several (small objects) together, with tongs", which share the root cid "pick up".[67] Infixation occurs with some stative verbs derived from classifiers, for instance the classifier 7id plus the stative suffix -(aa)gaa becomes 7yaadgaa.[67]
The definite article is suffixed -aay.[68] Some speakers shorten this suffix to -ay or -ei.[69] Some nouns, especially verbal nouns ending in long vowels and loan words, take -gaay instead, often accompanied by shortening or eliding preceding aa.[70][nb 3] Haida also has a partitive article -gyaa, referring to "part of something or ... to one or more objects of a given group or category," e.g. tluugyaa uu hal tlaahlaang 'he is making a boat (a member of the category of boats).'[71][nb 4] Partitive nouns are never definite, so the two articles never co-occur.[72]
Personal pronouns occur in independent and clitic forms, which may each be in either agentive or objective form; first and second person pronouns also have separate singular and plural forms.[73] The third person pronoun is only used for animates, though for possession ahljíi (lit. "this one") may be used; after relational nouns and prepositions 'wáa (lit. "it, that place, there") is used instead.[74]