The Hän language (alternatively spelled as Haen) (also known as Dawson, Han-Kutchin, Moosehide;

ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for ...

haa) is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Hän Hwëch'in (translated to ''people who live along the river'', sometimes anglicized as ''Hankutchin''). Athabascan refers to the interrelated complexity of languages spoken in Canada and Alaska each with its own dialect: the village of

Eagle, Alaska Eagle ( in Hän Athabascan) is a city on the south bank of the Yukon River near the Canada–US border in the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, Alaska, United States. It includes the Eagle Historic District, a U.S. National Historic Landmark. Th ...

in the United States and the town of Dawson City, Yukon Territory in Canada, though there are also Hän speakers in the nearby city of

Fairbanks, Alaska Fairbanks is a home rule city and the borough seat of the Fairbanks North Star Borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. Fairbanks is the largest city in the Interior region of Alaska and the second largest in the state. The 2020 Census put the p ...

. Furthermore, there was a decline in speakers in Dawson City as a result of the influx of gold miners in the mid-19th century. Hän is in the Northern Athabaskan subgrouping of the

Na-Dené Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered ...

language family. It is most closely related to Gwich'in and Upper Tanana.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of Hän are listed below with IPA notation on the left, the standard orthography in :

Vowels

Revitalization

There are about a dozen people, all elderly, who speak Hän as their native language, 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. As of September 2022, there was only one fluent speaker of Hän in Yukon, a 95 year old elder. Since 1991, the Robert Service School in

Dawson City Dawson City, officially the City of Dawson, is a town in the Canadian territory of Yukon. It is inseparably linked to the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–99). Its population was 1,577 as of the 2021 census, making it the second-largest town in Yuko ...

has hosted the Hän Language program, and the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in supports adult language classes and bi-annual cultural gatherings. 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

* Alaska Native Language Center
Alaska Native Language Center
(accessed July 24, 2005). * Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .

External links

Hän alphabet
* Alaska Native Language Center

* Yukon Native Language Centre
Hän

The Endangered Languages Project: Han
{{DEFAULTSORT:Han Language Hän Northern Athabaskan languages Indigenous languages of the North American Subarctic Indigenous languages of Alaska First Nations languages in Canada Languages of the United States Endangered Dené–Yeniseian languages Official languages of Alaska