Family Relationships

All languages have rich linguistic relationships that can be represented in family trees, and Dene is no exception. Although not all specialists on Dene agree on how to organize all the branches of Dene and its relatives, interested parties can learn much from viewing the various family trees linguists propose. 

• Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 21st Edition is a comprehensive listing of information about the currently known languages of the world. The database is owned by SIL International, updated every four years, and available in print and web versions. The Ethnologue database classifies the languages included in the DSA within a very large group called Eyak-Athabaskan. 
• Multicultural Canada is a digitization project led by Lynn Copeland at Simon Fraser University. 
• MultiTree is a searchable database of proposed language relationships. It enables users to access information on languages, compare language trees, and see graphical representations on all scholarly hypotheses for language relationships. For information on Dene, simply click on the Search button at the upper right, then open the folder labeled North America and select Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit.
• Native Languages of the Americas aims to to provide a complete library of the  materials available online for the more than 800 languages of the Americas and the people that speak them. This website places the languages included within the Dene Speech Atlas under the label Northwest Canadian Athapaskan Languages which is a part of a very large group called Athabaskan (Na‐Dene) Language Family. 
• Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 5000 Langauges is a resource compiled by Mark Rosenfelder that shows the similarities and differences of words for numbers across languages. Numbers in North Amerindian Languages categorizes the DSA languages under North American Indian languages with the group Na-Dene.
• World's Atlas of Language Structures Online is a project of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Max Planck Digital Library. It identifies twenty-two languages within the Na-Dene Family. 

Publications

• Morice, A.G. 1915. Chasta Costa and the Dene Languages of the North. In American Anthropologist, Vol. 17, n.s, no. 3, 1915. p. 559‐572. 
• Pilling, James Constantine. 1892. Bibliography of the Athapaskan Languages. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, Issue 14. Washington D.D.: Smithsonian Institution. 
• Ruhlen, Merritt. 1998. The Origin of the Na-Dene. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jan 28, 1998, 95: 13994–13996.
• Sapir, E. 1915. The Na-Dene Languages, a Preliminary Report. In American Anthropologist Volume 17, Issue 3, pages 534–558, July‐September 1915. This publication is also available at the Wiley Online Library. 

2018-08-07