Haida language
Haida is the language of the Haida people, spoken in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of western 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.
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 " 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 depending on whether or not the grammatical subject and object follow a hierarchy between persons and noun classes. Haida also has obligatory possession, where certain types of nouns cannot stand alone and require a possessor.
History
The first documented contact between the Haida and Europeans was in 1772, on Juan Pérez's exploratory voyage. At this time Haidas inhabited the Haida Gwaii, Dall Island, and Prince of Wales Island. The precontact Haida population was about 15,000; the first smallpox epidemic came soon after initial contact, reducing the population to about 10,000 and depopulating a large portion of the Ninstints dialect area. The next epidemic came in 1862, causing the population to drop to 1,658. Venereal disease and tuberculosis further reduced the population to 588 by 1915. This dramatic decline led to the merger of villages, the final result being three Haida villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg.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. This contact with whites had a strong effect on the Southern Haida, even as the Northern Haida remained culturally conservative. 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."
In 1862, William Duncan, a British Anglican missionary stationed at Fort Simpson, took fifty Tsimshian converts and created a new model community, Metlakatla, in Alaska. 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. These missionaries initially worked in the Haida language.
The Rev. John Henry Keen translated the Book of Common Prayer into Haida, published in 1899 in London by the Church Mission Society. The book of Psalms as well as 3 Gospels and Acts from the New Testament would also be translated into Haida. However, negative attitudes towards the use of the Haida language were widespread among the Haida people, even in the fairly conservative village of Masset where Keen was located. In an 1894 letter, Keen wrote:
Beginning at the turn of the century, Haida began sending their children to residential schools. This practice was most widespread among the Southern Haida; among the Northern Haida it was practiced by the more "progressive" families. 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
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.The Haida have a renewed interest in their traditional culture, and are now funding Haida language programs in schools in the three Haida communities, though these have been ineffectual. 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, entitled SGaawaay K’uuna, was due to be released in the United Kingdom in April 2019.
Classification
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. The classification of Haida has been contentious ever since, with some authors supporting its membership in the Na-Dené family, 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 argues that Haida does in fact belong to the Na-Dené family, though early loanwords make the evidence problematic.
The contentious Dene-Yeniseian languages proposal, which links the Na-Dené language family to the Yeniseian family of central Siberia, treats Haida as separate from the Na-Dené languages.
Dialects
Haida has a major dialectal division between Northern and Southern dialects. Northern Haida is split into Alaskan Haida and Masset Haida. Southern Haida was originally split into Skidegate Haida and Ninstints Haida, but Ninstints Haida is now extinct and is poorly documented. The dialects differ in phonology and to some extent vocabulary; however, they are grammatically mostly identical.Northern Haida is notable for its pharyngeal consonants. Pharyngeal consonants are rare among the world's languages, even in North America. 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, 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 Skidegate Haida, has allophone in syllable-final position.
Masset Haida phonology is complicated by various spreading processes caused by contiguous sonorants across morpheme boundaries, caused by loss of consonants in morpheme-initial 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. only occurs in some interjections and borrowings, and only occurs in the two words tleehll "five" and tl'lneeng. In Masset Haida and are both very common, and are involved in spreading and ablaut processes. Alaskan Haida has neither of these, but has a diphthong, introduced from contraction of low-toned and sequences.
In Skidegate Haida, some instances of the vowel are on an underlying level unspecified for quality; Enrico marks specified with the symbol . Unspecified becomes after, after alveolar and palatal consonants, and syllabic after lateral consonants. This does not exist in Masset Haida. A small class of Masset Haida words has a new vowel in place of this unspecified vowel which differs in quality from the vowel.
is the short counterpart of and so can also be analyzed as. Though quite variable in realization, it has an allophone when occurring after uvular and epiglottal consonants. 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.
- The contrasts of with, and with are neutralized when preceded by a velar/uvular/epiglottal consonant, as well as word-initially before the glottal stop.
- No contrast exists between long high vowels and short high vowels followed by a semivowel. Thus, is equivalent to, and is equivalent to ; moreover, is also equivalent to, and to.
- After consonants other than velar/uvular/epiglottal, and are also neutralized to and.
- Long vowels are shortened before syllable-final glottal consonants, the high vowels also before sonorant consonants. Where productive, this is a late process that applies after the preceding neutralizations, so that e.g. "the rock" is realized as, not.