Koyukon language

Koyukon (also called Denaakk'e) is an Athabaskan language spoken along the Koyukuk and middle Yukon River in western interior Alaska. It has about 300 speakers - generally older adults bilingual in English - from an ethnic population of 2,300^{[citation needed]}.

Jules Jette, a French Canadian Jesuit missionary, began recording the language and culture of the Koyukon people in 1898. Considered a fluent Koyukon speaker after spending years in the region, Jette died in 1927, leaving behind a significant quantity of notes on the Koyukon people, their culture and beliefs, and their language. Eliza Jones, an Alaskan native and member of the Koyukon tribe, came in contact with these manuscripts while studying, and later working, at the University of Alaska in the early 1970s. Working from Jette's notes, and in consultation with Koyukon tribal elders, Jones pieced together the Koyukon Athabaskan Dictionary, edited by James Kari and published by the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 2000.

The Koyukon Athabaskan Dictionary is unusually comprehensive in terms of documentation of an American indigenous language, in part because Jette's notes were of excellent quality and depth, and because these notes were taken around a century ago, when the language was far more actively spoken and the culture more traditional. The title 'dictionary' is misleading as the document is as much encyclopedic dictionary as it is a record of the culture and traditions of the Koyukon people.

There are also some traditional stories set down as readers by Catherine Attla and published by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Sounds are given in IPA with the orthographic equivalent in angled brackets^[1]:

Plosives and affricates, other than the labial b and the glottal ', distinguish plain, aspirated and ejective forms. Other consonants include labial and alveolar nasals; alveolar, velar and glottal fricatives; and alveolar and palatal approximants. Again other than the labial m and the glottal h, these distinguish forms with and without voice.

There are four full vowels in Koyukon:

• i ⟨ee⟩
• u ⟨oo⟩
• æ ⟨aa⟩
• ɔ ⟨o⟩

And there are three reduced vowels:

• ʊ ⟨u⟩
• ə ⟨e⟩
• ɞ ⟨ʉ⟩

• Ethnologue entry for Koyukon
• Service Book in the Dialect of the Qlīyukuwhūtana Indians: Portions of the Book of Common Prayer in Upper Koyukon (1908) digitized by Richard Mammana
• Alaska Native Language Center
• Word-Lists of the Athabaskan, Yup'ik and Alutiiq Languages by Lt. Laurence Zagoskin, 1847 (containing Koyukon on pages 3–8)