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by Gary Holton. The most widely accepted map of Alaska Native languages is Michael Krauss' Native Peoples and Languages of Alaska (1974, revised 1982). In Alaska today the map is ubiquitous.
Language map. In 1974, Michael Krauss published a language map of Alaska, which he later updated in 1982. It has remained the standard since then. In the summer of 2011, the Alaska Native Language Center made an update to Krauss's map. [1]
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- Language Relationships
- Family Trees
- Language Maps
- Distant Language Relationships
- Na-Dene
- Dene-Yeniseian
- Beyond Inuit-Aleut
By Gary Holton Alaska is home to at least 20 Native languages belonging to four distinct language families. As the term implies, a language family is a group of languages descended from a common ancestor. Languages related in this way often share many resemblances, just as do people descended from a common ancestor. Of course, just as unrelated peo...
Relationships between languages can be modeled in a way similar to human geneology using a family tree. At the lower levels of the tree this model is imperfect for describing langs, as the effects of diffusion become more pronounced. This is particularly true of the Athabascan family, where multiple features have diffused across the family in diffe...
Language relationships are often represented on a language map. The standard map of Alaska Native languages, Michael Krauss' Native Peoples and Languages of Alaska (1974, revised 1982), shows language relationships as shades of colors. The languages of the Inuit-Aleutfamily are shades of blue, while the languages of the Athabascan family of are sha...
Alaska is home to two of the world's major language families: Inuit-Aleut and Athabascan-Eyak-Tlingit (AET). For both of these families it is possible to use established linguistic methods to reconstruct an ancestral language, or proto-language, from which each of the languages is the family can be shown to descend through processes of regular soun...
The most widely-cited proposal for a distant genetic relationship is that connecting AET and the Haida language. This proposal goes back at least to the 19th century, but it was first formulated with the label "Na-Dene" by Edward Sapir in 1915. The name comes from the word for na meaning 'person' in Haida and the word dene meaning 'person' in many ...
Many other distant relationships have been proposed for AET. One of the most well-researched proposals is that connecting Dene and Caucasian languages. Although much work has been undertaken to reconstruct the proto-Dene-Caucasian language, this proposal has never gained wide-spread support. However, one part of this proposal has recently received ...
Many proposals have been offered to connect Inuit-Aleut languages with language families west of the Bering Strait. A connection between Greenlandic Inuit-Aleut and the Uralic languages was first proposaed in the 18th century. Over the years this proposal has been refined greatly. Another popular proposal is that connecting Inuit-Aleut with the Chu...
Krauss had been documenting the Eyak language, a Na-Dene language related to other Athabaskan languages, but one only spoken in four villages, since the early 1960s and had developed close friendships with the people of Cordova and Yakutat, where most Eyak had been relocated during territorial days.
Krauss is known first and foremost as an Athabaskanist and Eyak language specialist, a language that became extinct in January 2008. However, he worked on all of the 20 Native languages of Alaska, 18 of which belong to the Na-Dené and Eskimo–Aleut language families.
- Linguistics
- August 11, 2019 (aged 84), Needham, Massachusetts, U.S.
- American
Krauss is known foremost as a specialist in Athabascan and the Eyak language, which became extinct in January 2008. However, he worked on all of the 20 Native languages of Alaska, 18 of which belong to the Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut language families.
He spoke fluent Irish, Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese, in addition to French, some Russian, and, in some degree, scores of Alaskan Indigenous languages.
