Dena’ina and Ahtna

Sign at the Entrance to Ahtna Property, Mentasta, Alaska

In discussing Dena’ina, the most divergent of the Athapaskan languages, I mentioned that its Upper Inlet dialect (spoken in the area that is now Anchorage and the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, i.e., the most populous part of Alaska today) shows extensive influence from Ahtna, the language spoken to the east.  This probably accounts for most of the many differences between this dialect and the more conservative Dena’ina dialects further west in the lower Cook Inlet area.  James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center, who did the research on Dena’ina dialects I discussed in the previous post, has also done a lot of research on this contact between Ahtna and Upper Inlet Dena’ina, and he published an article summarizing his findings in 1977.

Ahtna is also an Athapaskan language, and it may be more closely related to Dena’ina than either is to the rest of the family; Kari notes a few very deep-seated grammatical similarities between the two.  Be that as it may, however, Dena’ina has undergone unique changes that make it very different from every other Athapaskan language, including Ahtna, and the two are not mutually intelligible.  All the Dena’ina dialects show sufficient similarity to indicate that they arose relatively recently from a single protolanguage, as discussed by Kari in a more recent paper, and it seems that that language had been relatively isolated from most other languages in the family for a relatively long period of time before its recent expansion.  Kari favors a location in southwestern Alaska, probably northwest of what is now Lake Clark National Park, for the Dena’ina Urheimat, although he acknowledges that somewhere in the Upper Inlet is another possibility.  This seems implausible to me, however, since one of the major differences between Dena’ina and most other Athapaskan languages is its radically simplified vowel system, which seems to show evidence of influence from Yup’ik Eskimo, which is spoken along the west coast of Alaska and probably has been for a long time.  Kari notes that there are relatively few Eskimo loanwords in any Dena’ina dialect, however, which suggests to me that this vowel system may have spread to proto-Dena’ina from another Athapaskan language in western Alaska which had in turn gotten it from Yup’ik.  (Note that the Yup’ik are the Eskimos who are not Inuit; Inuit, which is spoken further north, has an even simpler vowel system.)

In any case, by the time the Dena’ina spread into the Cook Inlet basin and began to adopt, to varying degrees, a more maritime subsistence pattern they had been separated from the main mass of Athapaskan speakers, who were mostly concentrated along the Yukon and Tanana Rivers, for a very long time, and their language was very distinct.  This distinctiveness may in fact have been deliberate, at least in part; one of the most distinctive characteristics of Dena’ina is its use of words, often for very common concepts like “water” and “fire” that appear to be Athapaskan in origin but are not the standard Athapaskan roots used by most languages for those meanings.  Kari implies that this “tabooistic replacement” (a term I’m not crazy about) may have had something to do with maintaining cultural boundaries, probably an important consideration for a group expanding into new and relatively unfamiliar territory.

When the Dena’ina reached the upper end of Cook Inlet, they would have soon encountered the Ahtna.  While they were (and are) based primarily in the valley of the Copper River to the east, the Ahtna were a  large, powerful tribe that expanded as far west as the Denali area, and as Kari notes they appear to have had the superior position in their contacts with the Dena’ina.  There are many Ahtna loanwords into Upper Inlet Dena’ina, as well as a certain amount of phonological influence leading to simplifications in the consonant system that make Upper Inlet Dena’ina very hard for speakers of other Dena’ina dialects to understand.  There were some borrowings in the other direction too, but fewer.  Many of Kari’s informants even seem to have explicitly said that they considered the Ahtna culturally superior to themselves.  The historic and ethnographic records give plenty of supporting evidence of extensive contact, trade, and intermarriage between the Upper Inlet Dena’ina and the western Ahtna, which corroborates the very strong linguistic evidence Kari presents.

The upshot of all this for culture history is not totally clear, but it definitely seems that the Dena’ina most likely spread from west to east, and the Ahtna may have been spreading in the other direction at approximately the same time.  Archaeological evidence suggests that the Dena’ina spread into the Kenai peninsula (across the inlet from their apparent homeland) took place less than a thousand years ago.  Since it seems very clear that the Athapaskans had been in Alaska for a very long time before that, certainly long enough for Dena’ina in the southwest to diverge markedly from the various languages that form a large dialect continuum in the Tanana and Yukon valleys, this suggests that the story of Athapaskan prehistory is both very complicated and very long-term.  Specific inferences useful in understanding the migration of other Athapaskans to the American Southwest, a process which must have begun long before the Dena’ina entered the Kenai, are not apparent.  But then, this is the opposite end of the Athapaskan world, so that’s not all that surprising.

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