Hän language
Northern Athabaskan language
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Hän is today considered to have two dialects; the Eagle Dialect, named for its use in Eagle Village, and the Moosehide dialect, named for Moosehide, a traditional village of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation in the Yukon.
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Classification
Hän is in the Northern Athabaskan subgrouping of the Na-Dené language family. It is most closely related to Gwich'in and Upper Tanana. Hän is sometimes referred to as a ʼHead Waters Athabaskanʼ language, an informal grouping that includes Hän, Gwichʼin, Northern Tutchone, Southern Tutchone, and Upper Tanana.
History
The decline of the Hän language is due in large part to a mass migration of 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon (the Klondike Gold Rush) in 1898 and immense precarity and violence endured by its communities that is perpetuated today through colonial occupation by Canada and the United States. On April 6, 2024, the last fluent speaker of Hän in Yukon, elder Percy Henry, estimated to be about 96, died.
Revitalization
There are fewer than a dozen first language speakers of Hän, all of whom are elderly though there is a growing second-language speaker community.
The Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin (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 newcomers which further promotes the development and revitalization of the language.
Since 1991, the Robert Service School in Dawson City has hosted the Hän Language program, and the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin 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.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonants of Hän are listed below with IPA notation on the left, the Moosehide dialect orthography in ⟨brackets⟩:
Vowels
Nasal vowels are marked orthographically in Hän, and all of the monophthong vowels can be either oral or nasal. Nasal vowels are written with a small tail (akin to the Polish ogonek) at the bottom of the vowel, so, for instance, nasal is written as ⟨ę⟩.