Hän language
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Hän (alternatively spelled as Haen) (also known as Han-Kutchin) is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Hän Hwëch'in (translated to people who live along the river, sometimes anglicized as Hankutchin). 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<ref name=":1">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref> and Tanacross in Alaska.
Hän is today considered to have two dialects; the Eagle Dialect, named for its use 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.<ref name=":0" /> 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 (the ʼKlondike Gold Rush) in 1898<ref name=":0" /> 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 Template:Angbr:<ref name=":0" />
Vowels
Nasal vowels 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 (akin to the Polish Template:Lang) at the bottom of the vowel, so, for instance, nasal Template:IPAslink is written as Template:Angbr.<ref name="YNLC_Alphabet">Template:Cite web</ref>
Revitalization
There are fewer than a dozen first language speakers of Hän, all of whom are elderly<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> though there is a growing second-language speaker community.
The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in (formerly known as the Dawson First Nation) 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.<ref name=":1" /> As of April 2024, the last fluent speaker of Hän in Yukon, a 96-year-old elder, died.<ref name="CBC">Template:Cite web</ref>
Since 1991, the Robert Service School in Dawson City has hosted the Hän Language program, and the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in supports adult language classes and bi-annual cultural gatherings.<ref name=":0" />
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.
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
- Hän alphabet
- Alaska Native Language Center: Han
- Yukon Native Language Centre: Hän Template:Webarchive
- The Endangered Languages Project: Han
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