Haida language

The first documented contact between the Haida and Europeans was in 1772, on Juan Pérez's exploratory voyage. At this time Haidas inhabited the , Dall Island, and Prince of Wales Island. The next epidemic came in 1862, causing the population to drop to 1,658. In the 1830s a pidgin trade language based on Haida, known as Haida Jargon, was used in the islands by speakers of English, Haida, Coast Tsimshian, and Heiltsuk. The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858 led to a boom in the town of Victoria, and Southern Haida began traveling there annually, mainly for the purpose of selling their women. For this the Haida used Chinook Jargon. For instance, Skidegate Haida were reported as dressing in the European fashion in 1866, while Northern Haida "were still wearing bearskins and blankets ten years later." The new village was greatly successful, and throughout the Northwest coast the attitude spread that abandoning tradition would pave the way for a better life. The Haida themselves invited missionaries to their community, the first arriving in 1876. The book of Psalms as well as 3 Gospels and Acts from the New Testament would also be translated into Haida. These schools strictly enforced a ban on the use of native languages, and played a major role in the decimation of native Northwest Coast languages. The practice of Haida families using English to address children spread in Masset in the 1930s, having already been practiced in Skidegate, the rationale being that this would aid the children in their school education. After this point few children were raised with Haida as a primary language. ==Status==

welcome sign Today most Haida do not speak the Haida language. The language is listed as "critically endangered" in UNESCO's ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'', with nearly all speakers elderly. As of 2003, most speakers of Haida are between 70 and 80 years of age, though they speak a "considerably simplified" form of Haida, and comprehension of the language is mostly limited to persons above the age of 50. The language is rarely used even among the remaining speakers and comprehenders. Haida classes are available in many Haida communities and can be taken at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, Ketchikan, and Hydaburg. A Skidegate Haida language app is available for iPhone, based on a "bilingual dictionary and phrase collection words and phrases archived at the online Aboriginal language database FirstVoices.com." In 2017 Kingulliit Productions was working on the first feature film to be acted entirely in Haida; the actors had to be trained to pronounce the lines correctly. The film, titled SGaawaay K’uuna ("Edge of the Knife"), premiered publicly at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. ==Classification==

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. and others arguing that this classification is due to errors or loanwords in the early data on Haida. Today, Haida is generally considered to be a language isolate. However, 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. ==Dialects==

Haida has a major dialectal division between Northern and Southern dialects. 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. The pharyngeal consonants of Wakashan and Northern Haida are known to have developed recently. ==Phonology==

Consonants } • The plain stops are partially voiced in syllable-initial position. • For some speakers, occurs only at the beginning of syllables, while does not occur there, making them allophones of the same phoneme. • In Northern Haida (Masset Haida and Alaskan Haida), historically developed into , with then being reintroduced by occasional borrowings from Southern Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Chinook jargon. The actual realization of the pharyngeal consonants varies with dialect. In Masset Haida they are pharyngeal fricatives, , whereas in the variety of Alaskan Haida spoken in Hydaburg they have been described as an epiglottal trill and a trilled epiglottal affricate or an epiglottal stop respectively. In Alaskan Haida, all velar, uvular, and epiglottal consonants, as well as for some speakers, have rounded variants resulting from coalescence of clusters with . Alaskan Haida also shows simplification of to when preceding an alveolar or postalveolar obstruent, and of to . In Skidegate Haida, has allophone in syllable-final position. Vowels The high vowels may be realized as upper mid to high and include lax as well as tense values. The vowels are rare in Skidegate Haida. In Skidegate Haida, some instances of the vowel are on an underlying level unspecified for quality; Enrico (2003) marks specified with the symbol . This does not exist in Masset Haida. The sequences and tend towards and for some speakers. A number of the contrasts between vowels, or sequences of vowels and the semivowels and , are neutralized in certain positions: • The short vowels do not contrast after the alveolar and postalveolar fricatives and affricates. Only one short vowel occurs in this position, in Alaskan Haida usually realized as , but when further followed by , and when followed by any rounded consonant. • No contrast exists between long high vowels and short high vowels followed by a semivowel. Thus, is equivalent to , and is equivalent to ; • After consonants other than velar/uvular/epiglottal, and are also neutralized to and . The vowels and short occur in nonsense syllables in Haida songs. Unmarked heavy syllables (those with long vowels or ending in sonorants) have high pitch, and unmarked light syllables have low pitch: ' "dog", ' "sapwood". In Masset Haida marked low tone syllables are more common, resulting from elision of intervocalic consonants: compare Skidegate ' to Masset ' "net". In Masset Haida, marked low tone syllables have extra length, thus ' "thing", ' "mother". In Kaigani, the system is primarily one of pitch accent, with at most one syllable per word featuring high tone in most words, though there are some exceptions (e.g. '''' "almost"), and it is not always clear what should be considered an independent "word". High tone syllables are usually heavy (having a long vowel or ending in a sonorant). Phonotactics The syllable template in Haida is (C(C(C)))V(V)(C(C)). In Masset Haida the unaspirated stops and affricates which may be in the syllable coda are , in Alaskan Haida . Would-be final in loanwords may be nativized to zero. In Skidegate Haida a long syllabic lateral may appear in VV position, e.g. '''' "sew". ==Orthography==

First orthography Several orthographies have been devised for writing Haida. The first alphabet was devised by the missionary Charles Harrison of the Church Mission Society who translated some Old Testament Stories in the Haida Language, and some New Testament books. These were published by the British and Foreign Bible Society with the Haida Gospel of Matthew in 1891, Haida Gospel of Luke in 1899 and the Haida Gospel of John in 1899, and the book of Acts in Haida in the 1890s. Modern orthography The linguist John Enrico created another orthography for Skidegate and Masset Haida which introduced and as letters and did away with the distinction between upper and lower case, and this system is popular in Canada. Another alphabet was devised by Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) for Kaigani Haida in 1972, based on Tlingit orthographic conventions, and is still in use. Robert Bringhurst, for his publications on Haida literature, created an orthography without punctuation or numerals, and few apostrophes; and in 2008 the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program (SHIP) created another, which is the usual orthography used in Skidegate. Other systems have been used by isolated linguists. ==Grammar==

Morphology The word classes in Haida are nouns, verbs, postpositions, demonstratives, quantifiers, adverbs, clitics, exclamations, replies, classifiers, and instrumentals. Haida morphology is mostly suffixing. Infixation occurs with some stative verbs derived from classifiers, for instance the classifier ' plus the stative suffix ' becomes '. Some speakers shorten this suffix to ' or '. Some nouns, especially verbal nouns ending in long vowels and loan words, take ' instead, often accompanied by shortening or eliding preceding '. Haida also has a partitive article ', referring to "part of something or ... to one or more objects of a given group or category," e.g. '''' 'he is making a boat (a member of the category of boats).' Partitive nouns are never definite, so the two articles never co-occur. 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. The third person pronoun is only used for animates, though for possession ' (lit. "this one") may be used; after relational nouns and prepositions ' (lit. "it, that place, there") is used instead. Number is not marked in most nouns, but is marked in certain cases in verbs. Relationship nouns do have a plural in with ' (or for many speakers '), e.g. ' "my grandfathers". A few verbs have suppletive plural forms, as in many other North American languages. The third person pronoun that is pluralized can have any grammatical function, e.g. ' "I bought all their fish" (Masset). The updated orthography for Alaska Haida has changed the ' to '. For example, Haida ' / ' / ' "surface" likely comes from ' "back (noun)", and Alaskan Haida ' "side facing away from the beach, towards the woods" comes from the noun ' "away from the beach, place in the woods". Haida has a small class of true postpositions, some of which may be suffixed to relational nouns. The Alaskan postpositions ' "to" and ' "from" (Skidegate ', ') fuse to the preceding word. Haida demonstratives are formed from the bases ' (close to speaker), ' (close to listener), ' (away from both), and ' (something previously mentioned), which when used independently are place demonstratives. These may be given the following suffixes to create other demonstratives: ' (singular object), ' (plural objects), ' (quantity or time), ' (place), ' (plural people), ' (area), and ' (manner). The past and inferential forms are both used to refer to events in the past, but differ in evidentiality: the inferential marks that the speaker was informed of or inferred the event rather than having experienced it personally. The bare present form refer to present-tense events, while future is formed with the suffix ', using a present-form verb, e.g. ' "he will go". The interrogative past form, made from the inferential form by removing final ', is used in place of both past and inferential forms in sentences with question words. There are four classes of verb stems: Habitual aspect uses the suffix ' in the present and inferential and ' in the past. Potential mood is marked with ' and hortative with the particle ' (in the same position as the tense suffixes). Imperatives are marked with the particle ' after the first phrase in the sentence, or ' after the verb word (the verb dropping final weak ' if present) if there is no non-verbal phrase. Verbs are negated with the negative suffix ', usually with the negative word ' "not" in sentence-head position. Verbs drop weak ' before this suffix, e.g. '' "he is not doing it that way". Some verb stems, known as bound stems'', must occur with at least one such affix; for example ' "strike once" requires an instrumental prefix. These have a limited number of rhyme structures, which relate to each other ideophonically. For some types of objects, classificatory prefixes are used, e.g. ' "two land otters" ('''' = small animal or fish). Syntax Haida clauses are verb-final. SOV word order is always possible, while OSV may also be used when the subject is more 'potent' than the object; thus Haida is a direct–inverse language. For example, a human is more potent than a horse, which is more potent than a wagon. The following groups are listed in descending order of potency: "known single adult free humans; non-adult and/or enslaved and/or unknown and/or grouped humans; non-human higher animals; inanimates and lower organisms (fish and lower)." Pronouns are placed adjacent to the verb and cliticized to it. Their internal order is object–subject, or in causatives object-causee-subject, for example ' Bill me you punch-direct.that-PA "You told Bill to punch me / Bill told you to punch me". Potency is also relevant for pronoun ordering when one pronoun is less potent, for example the indefinite pronoun ' in ' = ' 'she took some.' Sentences with ' "someone" or ' "some people" as the subject may be translated as passive sentences in English, for example '''' "he was seen (by more than one person)", literally "some people saw him". Clitic pronouns are used as complements of verbs, as inalienable possessives, with quantifiers, and in Skidegate Haida as the objects of some postpositions. Verbs taking agentive subjects are most common in the lexicon (about 69%), followed by those taking objective subjects (29%) and those that may take either (2%). Intransitive verbs of inherent states (e.g. "be old") take an objective subject, while most transitive verbs take agentive subjects (but cf. verbs like ' "like"). With some verbs that may take either, there may be a semantic difference involved, e.g. ' (Masset) which means "refuse" with agentive subject but not want with objective subject. Enrico (2003) argues that the agentive case indicates planning; thus Haida is essentially an active–stative language, though subject case is also variable in some transitive verbs. Independent pronouns are used instead of clitic pronouns when modified by a clitic, so for example ' "he got well" becomes ' "he also got well" when the clitic '''' 'also, too' is added. Focus and less commonly topic are marked with the clitic ', placed after a sentence-initial constituent, e.g. ' (Skidegate) "Bill saw Mary" / "Mary saw Bill", '''' "That one, he was called 'qaagaa. Question words always take this enclitic, for example ' "what?", ' "where?", '''' "when?". There are multiple ways that Haida marks possession. Haida has obligatory possession, a common feature of native North American languages where certain nouns (in Haida, family relationship, body part, and "relational" nouns) must occur with a possessor and cannot stand alone. For example, one can say ' "my mother" but not *', though one may use a circumlocution like '''' 'one who is a mother'. These nouns are possessed using the bound objective pronouns, which all precede the noun except '''' 'one's own'. Included in the class of obligatorily possessed nouns are so-called "relational nouns" and postpositions, which generally translate to prepositions or prepositional phrases in English and refer to temporal and spatial relations. Relational nouns take some special third person possessive pronouns (' rather than '), e.g. ' "in(side) it" (lit. "its interior"). An alternate construction when the possessor is a pronoun is to place an independent objective pronoun after the possessed noun, the latter in definite form, e.g. ' "my house". The independent objective pronouns also occur by themselves with possessive force, e.g. '''' "mine". ==Examples==

Phrases in the Alaskan dialect ==Notes==

• • • • • • • • • • • Enrico, John. 2003. Haida Syntax. (2 volumes). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. • Enrico, John. 2005. Haida Dictionary: Skidegate, Masset, and Alaskan Dialects. (2 volumes). Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center; Juneau: Sealaska Heritage Institute. • Fisher, Robin. 1992. "Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890." UBC Press. • Greenberg, J.H. 1987a. Language in the Americas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. • Greenberg, J.H. 1987b. "The Na-Dene Problem". In Greenberg (1987a), pp. 321–330. • Harrison, Charles. 1925. "Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific; The Haidas, Their Laws, Customs and Legends." London, H. F. & G. Witherby. • • • • • • • Pinnow. H-J. 1985. Das Haida als Na-Dene Sprache. (Abhandlungen der völkerkundlichen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Hefte 43–46.) Nortorf, Germany: Völkerkundliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft. • Pinnow. H-J. 2006a. ''Die Na-Dene-Sprachen im Lichte der Greenberg-Klassifikation. / The Na-Déné Languages in Light of Greenberg's Classification.'' Zweite erweiterte Auflage / Second revised edition. Bredstedt: Druckerei Lempfert. • Pinnow. H-J. 2006b. Sprachhistorische Untersuchung zur Stellung des Haida als Na-Dene-Sprache. (Unveränderte Neuausgabe aus INDIANA 10, Gedenkschrift Gerdt Kutscher. Teil 2. Berlin 1985. Mit einem Anhang = Die Na-Dene-Sprachen im Verhältnis zum Tibeto-Chinesischen.) Bredstedt: Druckerei Lempfert. • • • • • Swanton, John R. 1905. Haida Texts and Myths. Skidegate dialect. (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 29.) Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. • Swanton, John R. 1908. Haida Texts. Masset Dialect. (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 10, part 2.) Leiden: E. J. Brill. ==External links==