As I mentioned in the last post, it’s generally thought that the Athapaskan migrations which eventually led to the entrance of the Navajos and Apaches into the Southwest began in Alaska. The northern Athapaskan languages are actually spoken over a very large area of northwestern Canada as well, but the linguistic evidence clearly points to Alaska as the original place where Proto-Athapaskan was spoken at the last point before it splintered into the various Athapaskan languages. That is, the Urheimat of the Athapaskans seems to have been somewhere in Alaska.
There are two main pieces of evidence pointing to this conclusion. One is the fact that it has been quite well established at this point that the Athapaskan language family as a whole is related to the recently-extinct language Eyak, which was spoken in south-central Alaska. Eyak was clearly not an Athapaskan language itself, but it had sufficient similarities to reconstructed Proto-Athapaskan to establish a genetic relationship. Since Eyak was spoken in Alaska, it therefore seems most probable that the most recent common ancestor of both Eyak and the Athapaskan languages (Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak) was also spoken in Alaska. This is not very strong evidence on its own, however, since Eyak was only a single language spoken by a relatively small group of people, and there is some fairly strong evidence that they have not lived in their current location for a very long time (although they may well have moved there from elsewhere in Alaska).
A stronger piece of evidence is the internal diversity of the Athapaskan languages themselves. A general principle in historical linguistics is that the Urheimat of a language family is likely to be found where there is maximal diversity among the languages in the family. That is, since language families often spread through migration, areas with many languages from the family that are not particularly closely related to each other in relatively small area are more likely locations for the Urheimat than areas with fewer languages that are more closely related. When it comes to Athapaskan, this condition obtains most strongly in Alaska. The languages in Canada and the Lower 48 are all relatively closely related to each other within the family as compared to some of the languages in Alaska. Although interior Alaska is overwhelmingly dominated by Athapaskan groups, the linguistic boundaries among these various groups, even those adjacent to each other, are often extremely sharp.
This is particularly the case when it comes to the most divergent of all the Athapaskan languages: Dena’ina. (Note that in many publications this term is spelled “Tanaina,” and I have spelled it that way myself in the past. “Dena’ina” is the generally preferred form these days, being closer to the original pronunciation and consistent with the principles of the currently used orthography.) This is the language traditionally spoken around Cook Inlet in south-central Alaska, including the Anchorage area. While it’s clearly Athapaskan, it’s very weird as Athapaskan languages go. It is not mutually intelligible with any other Athapaskan language, although it borders several of them, and it is in turn divided into several internal dialects that are strikingly diverse. James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, published an article on Dena’ina dialects in 1975 based on original fieldwork. The basic conclusions were that there are two main dialects, Upper Inlet and Lower Inlet, and that Lower Inlet is further subdivided into two or three subdialects: Outer Inlet, Inland, and Iliamna (which lies between the two other dialects and shows similarities to both, although Kari seems to consider it likely that it is ultimately more closely related to the Outer Inlet dialect with the similarities to the Inland dialect due to later influence). In general, the Lower Inlet dialect is more conservative than the Upper Inlet one, which shows extensive influence from the neighboring Ahtna language, which is also Athapaskan but not very similar to Dena’ina. Within the Lower Inlet dialect, the Inland dialect is the most conservative, as well as the one with by far the most speakers of any of the dialects as of 1975. Both these conditions are presumably due to the relative isolation of this dialect, which is spoken in the Lake Clark area and further north in Lime Village. Kari considers this the most likely homeland of Dena’ina speakers, whom he sees as having moved from the interior to the coast relatively recently, although he acknowledges that this cannot be established based on linguistic evidence alone.
Despite the relative conservatism of the Lower Inlet dialect, however, all its subdialects do show a certain amount of influence from Yup’ik Eskimo (particularly in the development of the Proto-Athapaskan vowel system). This is unsurprising, as these dialects lie on the boundary of the Yup’ik area to the west and south, and the Dena’ina groups in these areas show extensive Eskimo influence in many aspects of their traditional culture. This is particularly the case for the Outer Inlet groups, especially those at the southern end of Cook Inlet, who adopted a much more maritime-oriented culture than is typical of Athapaskans. These cultural distinctions within the overall Dena’ina society were documented by Cornelius Osgood of Yale in the 1930s. In an article published in 1933 he noted that the main distinctions among the Dena’ina groups were economic, having to do with their subsistence systems, while other social systems were pretty similar across the various groups. The Lower Inlet groups, especially those in the Seldovia area on Kachemak Bay near the outlet of Cook Inlet, showed a much heavier dependence on hunting sea mammals and a correspondingly heavier influence from nearby Yup’ik Eskimo groups with a similar adaptation than their compatriots further north who had a more typically Athapaskan lifestyle based on salmon fishing and hunting of terrestrial animals.
The fact that Dena’ina, the most divergent of the Athapaskan languages and therefore the one that most likely split earliest from Proto-Athapaskan, is spoken in Alaska makes it very likely that Proto-Athapaskan was spoken in Alaska as well. Indeed, if Kari is right that the Lake Clark area was the original homeland of the Dena’ina, this potentially places Proto-Athapaskan quite far west within Alaska and quite close to areas traditionally occupied by Eskimo-speakers. It should be noted, however, that it’s still very unclear when the breakup of Proto-Athapaskan occurred and who occupied which parts of Alaska at that time. Nevertheless, the evidence from Dena’ina, which is still one of the least-understood Athapaskan languages despite its obvious importance for Athapaskan studies, seems to pretty clearly show that whenever the important early events in the history of the language family occurred, they almost certainly occurred somewhere in Alaska.
Osgood, C. (1933). Tanaina Culture American Anthropologist, 35 (4), 695-717 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1933.35.4.02a00070
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