Hän language
Hän is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Hän Hwëch'in. The Hän language is spoken and supported by the Hän nation across localized communities who, since time immemorial, have lived in what is today called the Upper Yukon region; The village of Eagle, Alaska, in the United States; the town of Dawson City, Yukon Territory, in Canada; as well as Fairbanks and Tanacross in Alaska.
Hän is today considered to have two dialects; the Eagle Dialect, named for its use in Eagle Village, and the Moosehide dialect, named for Moosehide, a traditional village of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation in the Yukon.
Hän is in the Northern Athabaskan subgrouping of the Na-Dené language family. It is most closely related to Gwich'in and Upper Tanana. Hän is sometimes referred to as a ʼHead Waters Athabaskanʼ language, an informal grouping that includes Hän, Gwichʼin, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, and Upper Tanana.
The decline of the Hän language is due in large part to a mass migration of 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon in 1898 and immense precarity and violence endured by its communities that is perpetuated today through colonial occupation by Canada and the United States.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonants of Hän are listed below with IPA notation on the left, the Moosehide dialect orthography in :Vowels
s are marked orthographically in Hän, and all of the monophthong vowels can be either oral or nasal. Nasal vowels are written with a small tail at the bottom of the vowel, so, for instance, nasal is written as.Revitalization
There are fewer than a dozen first language speakers of Hän, all of whom are elderly though there is a growing second-language speaker community.The Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin in the Yukon Territory support the revitalization of Hän, and there are current efforts to revive the language locally. There is an effort to promote traditional skills and finding a balance between the way of the newcomer's which further promotes the development and revitalization of the language. As of April 2024, the last fluent speaker of Hän in Yukon, a 96-year-old elder, has died.
Since 1991, the Robert Service School in Dawson City has hosted the Hän Language program, and the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin supports adult language classes and bi-annual cultural gatherings.
There are many other resources used to learn Hän, particularly online ones such as, FirstVoices and Yukon Native Learning Centre. These online learning language tools teach the tradition, culture, history, and the language of Hän.