Gwichüin () is an Athabaskan language spoken by the Gwichüin First Nation (in Canada) and Alaska Native People (in the United States). It is also known in older or dialect-specific publications as Kutchin, Takudh, Tukudh, or Loucheux. Gwichüin is spoken primarily in the towns of Inuvik, Aklavik, Fort McPherson (aka Teetà Âüit Zheh), and Tsiigehtchic (formerly Arctic Red River), all in the Northwest Territories and Old Crow in Yukon of Canada. In Alaska of the United States, Gwichüin is spoken in Fort Yukon, Chalkyitsik, Birch Creek, Venetie and Arctic Village.
According to the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, Gwichüin is at present severely endangered. There are about 260 Gwichüin speakers in Canada out of a total Gwichüin population of 1,900. About 300 out of a total Alaska Gwichüin population of 1,100 speak the language. Gwichüin speakers have been shifting from their heritage language to English as the majority language of both the US and Canada.
There are two main varieties of Gwichüin, Eastern and Western, which are delineated roughly at the CanadaâÂÂUS border. There are several dialects within these subgroupings, including Fort Yukon Gwichüin, Arctic Village Gwichüin, Western Canada Gwichüin (Takudh, Tukudh, Loucheux), and Arctic Red River. Each village has unique pronunciation features, vocabulary, and expressions.
Inhabitants of Old Crow in the northern Yukon speak a similar dialect to those bands living in Venetie and Arctic Village, Alaska. Kâachik and Tâachik dialects are spoken in Johnson Creek village.
In 1988, the NWT Official Languages Act named Gwichüin an official language of the Northwest Territories, and the Official Languages of Alaska Law as amended declared Gwichüin a recognized language in 2014.
The Gwichüin language is taught regularly at the Chief Zzeh Gittlit School in Old Crow, Yukon.
Projects are underway to further document the language from a linguistic standpoint, and foster the writing and translation skills of younger Gwichüin speakers. In one project, lead research associate and fluent speaker Gwichüin elder Kenneth Frank works with linguists and young Gwichüin speakers affiliated with the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to document traditional knowledge of caribou anatomy (Mishler and Frank 2020).
Assimilation efforts through residential schools played a factor in creating a cultural disruption and a language shift. One of the goals of residential schools was to wipe out indigenous culture and replace it with the European culture, seen as more conducive to âÂÂcivilizedâ society. In the process, indigenous children were taken away from their families and placed in a dedicated school (âÂÂIndian Schoolsâ in the US).
Indigenous children were often punished for speaking First-Nation languages, leading children to abandon their heritage languages. Residential schools caused major cultural disruption also among the GwichâÂÂin.
The consonants of Gwichüin are shown in IPA notation below, with orthographic symbols in brackets:
GwichâÂÂin has five phonemic vowel qualities which contrast in duration, nasality, and tones.
Short vowels show different vowel qualities from their long counterparts:
Gwichüin has moderate complexity of syllable structure, in which the maximal syllable shape is CCVC. However, no consonant clusters occur within a syllable besides /Cj/ onsets, as in âÂÂhookâÂÂ, or - - âÂÂfatherâ (i.e. âÂÂmy fatherâÂÂ). Word-medially, two-consonant sequences may occur. All consonants may occur syllable-initially (i.e. in onset position), but syllable-finally, no ejective, retroflex, affricate, interdental or labialized consonants occur. In coda-position, fricatives are also restricted to the glottal, lateral, and non-sibilant consonants.
The missionary Robert McDonald first started working on the written representation of Van Tat and Dagoo dialects Gwichüin. He also produced a Bible and a hymn book which was written in Gwichüin in 1898. McDonald used English orthography as his model when representing Gwichüin. This was unusual for missionaries at the time: other missionaries were translating the Bible from French into languages such as northern Slavey. After 1960, Wycliffe Bible translator Richard Mueller introduced a new modified spelling system. The purpose of his writing system was to better distinguish the sounds of the Gwichüin language. Later on, Mueller's writing system was officially adopted by the Yukon Territory. The new writing system helped expand the uses of the Gwichüin language since speakers previously found the system for writing Gwichüin less user friendly.
Gwichüin is a highly polysynthetic, head-marking language with extensive exclusive prefixal inflection. Word order is relatively flexible but generally follows a SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) pattern. The language exhibits evidentiality and verbal inflection that conveys aspectual distinctions rather than tense. Gwichüin uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Like other Athabaskan languages, Gwichüin has classifier prefixes in verbs that indicate transitivity and valency changes.
A verb in Gwichüin contains a great number of smaller meaningful units or morphemes (e.g. in English un-spok-en) that combine to give the verb its intended meaning. A verb is composed of the stem preceded by a varying number of prefixes, which in Gwichüin contain information about tense, aspect, and the number of people involved in the action.
Unlike English verbs, which come with comparatively very little derivation and inflection (i.e. number of affixes), a Gwichüin verb is so rich in affixes that a single inflected and conjugated verb can correspond to whole sentences in English, as in (1).
In the PBS Kids television show Molly of Denali, the main character Molly comes from a family of Gwichüin background, and therefore uses words in the Gwichüin language such as throughout the show. Molly shares her Gwichüin background with the show's creative producer, Princess Daazhraii Johnson.