Athabaskan Origins: Special Session at the 2009 Athabaskan Languages Conference

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The 2009 Athabaskan Languages Conference, to be held at the University of California, Berkeley, will feature a special session that addresses one of the outstanding questions in the study of prehistoric America: the precise Asian origins of indigenous Americans. Athabaskan is the largest indigenous language family in North America, both in terms of land area and number of speakers. It spreads over a huge area, with concentrations in Western Canada (Slave, Dëne Suliné, Sarsi), Alaska (Koyukon, Ahtna, Gwich'in), the west coast of the US (Hupa, Tolowa), and the US Southwest (Navajo, Apache). Despite their great geographic separation, the languages are very closely related. Although Athabaskan languages are highly endangered and incompletely researched, documentation and comparative analysis have advanced to the point that it is possible to establish reliable reconstructions of Na-Dene, a protolanguage that is the common ancestor of Athabaskan and the modern Tlingit and Eyak languages. These reconstructions, in turn, have made it possible for linguists from several institutions to assemble compelling evidence in support of a long-sought connection between Na-Dene and the Yeniseian language family of Siberia. Their research has shown that the abstract forms of words and the rules of composition of the verb in Yeniseian languages find systematic and numerous parallels in Na-Dene. These correspondences are too numerous and share too many idiosyncratic features to be explained by anything other than common descent. The comparison has also shown conclusively that Haida, sometimes associated with Na-Dene, is not related. The 2009 Athabaskan Languages Conference will bring together in one place many of the scholars who have participated in this multifaceted research effort. It will be an opportunity for the evidence supporting the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis to be discussed and critically evaluated by an audience of specialists in Athabaskan and other Na-Dene languages. If correct, the Dene-Yeniseian connection is the first solid linguistic evidence connecting Asian and indigenous American populations. These results have ramifications for our understanding of the prehistoric movement of North American populations. The distance from the Yeniseian range to the most distant Athabaskan languages is the greatest overland distance covered by any known language spread not using wheeled transport or sails. Archaeologists have speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times. The research therefore also has important implications for the theory and practice of historical linguistics itself. Although the precise age of well-understood language families such as Indo-European is sometimes disputed, the oldest dates accepted by most researchers are typically no more than 6,000 BP. Some scholars have suggested that this is near the outer limit of reliability for historical-comparative linguistic methods. The Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis raises the possibility that the method may be reliably used to establish linguistic relationships of a much greater time depth, at least as far back as the last migration from Eastern Siberia into North America, and perhaps much earlier.