The Dakelh () or Carrier language is a Northern Athabaskan language. It is named after the Dakelh people, a First Nations people of the Central Interior of British Columbia, Canada, commonly known as Carrier. The term Carrier has been applied to languages including Babine-Witsuwit'en, but current usage among linguists excludes Babine-Witsuwit'en, which is considered a sister language.
Etymology The name 'Carrier' is a translation of the Sekani name 'aɣele' "people who carry things around on their backs", due to the fact that the first Europeans to learn of the Carrier, the Northwest Company explorers led by Alexander Mackenzie, first passed through the territory of the Carriers' Sekani neighbours.
The received view of the origin of the Sekani name is that it refers to the distinctive Carrier mortuary practice in which a widow carried her husband's ashes on her back during the period of mourning. An alternative hypothesis is that it refers to the fact that the Dakeł, unlike the Sekani, participated in trade with the coast, which required packing loads of goods over the Grease Trails.
Phonology
Inventory
Consonants All dialects of Carrier have essentially the same consonant system, which is shown in this chart.Walker, Richard (1979) "Central Carrier Phonemics," in Eric P. Hamp et al. (eds.) Contributions to Canadian Linguistics. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada. pp. 93–107.
Bilabial Alveolar Post-alveolar Velar Glottal central lateral plain labial laminal apical Nasal m n n(y) n(g) Plosive/Affricate tenuis b (d̲z̲ ) d dz dl j g gw ʼ aspirated p (t̲s̲ ) t ts tl ch k kw ejective (t̲s̲’ ) tʼ tsʼ tlʼ chʼ kʼ kwʼ Fricative voiceless f (s̲ ) s lh sh kh wh h voiced v (z̲ ) z gh ghw w Approximant r l y
There are three series of stops and affricates: aspirated, unaspirated (written voiced in the practical orthography), and ejective.
As of the late 20th century, some conservative older speakers of Carrier had a contrast between apico-alveolar and lamino-dental series of fricatives and affricates. For other speakers, the lamino-dental series have merged with the apico-alveolar series. The contrast had become so obscure that when, in 1995, after many years of effort, the Carrier Bible Fellowship finally published the Stuart Lake dialect translation of the New Testament, they omitted marking of the lamino-dental series.
Vowels
Carrier has six surface-phonemic vowels:
Front Central BackClose i oo Mid e u o Open a
Front and back vowels are tense in open syllables and lax in closed syllables. The reduced vowel is quite variable in its realization: it approaches immediately preceding and approaches when either or both adjacent consonants are laryngeal. Unlike in some related languages, there is no distinctive nasalization; that is, Carrier does not contrast oral and nasal vowels.
The great majority of instances of are predictable from the phonotactics, introduced in order to create an acceptable syllable structure. The remaining instances are all found in certain forms of the verb where the morphology requires some vowel to be present.
In most if not all dialects there are surface-phonemic distinctions of vowel length. However, all of the long vowels that create such distinctions are morphophonemically derived. There is no need to represent vowel length in lexical representations.
Tone Carrier has a very simple tone system of the type often described as pitch accent—it is in fact very similar to the prototypical pitch-accent language, Japanese. In Dakeł, a word may or may not have a tonic syllable. If it does not, the pitch rises gradually across the phonological word. If it does have a tonic syllable, then that syllable has a high pitch, the following syllable falls to a low pitch, and subsequent syllables until the end of the prosodic unit are also low pitched. Any syllable in the word may carry the accent; if it is the final syllable, then the first syllable of the following word is low pitched, even if it would otherwise be tonic. Representing this phonemic drop in pitch with the downstep symbol , there is a contrast between the surface tone following an unaccented word xoh "goose" compared with the accented word jəsꜜ "wolf":
"He sees the goose."
"He sees the wolf."
However, after a tonic syllable, the high pitch of jəsꜜ "wolf" is lost:
"One wolf"
Phonotactics In general, Carrier syllables are maximally CVC. All consonants, other than the extremely rare , are found in syllable-initial position. The possible coda consonants, on the other hand, are restricted. All sonorants except for the extremely rare palatal nasal may occur in the coda, but of the obstruents only the pulmonic unaspirated series occur. Affricates are not found in the coda with the exception of a few instances of . Palatals are also absent from the coda.
Word-internally consonant clusters occur only at the juncture between two syllables. Tautosyllablic clusters are found only word-initially, where any of the onset consonants may be preceded by or .
Nasals at all points of articulation are syllabic word-initially preceding a consonant.
Writing system The writing system in general use today is the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system, a Roman-based system developed in the 1960s by missionaries and a group of Carrier people with whom they worked. The CLC writing system was designed to be typed on a standard English typewriter. It uses numerous digraphs and trigraphs to write the many Carrier consonants not found in English, e.g. for and for , with an apostrophe to mark glottalization, e.g. for the ejective alveolar affricate. Letters generally have their English rather than European values. For example, represents while represents .
+ Carrier alphabet (Carrier Linguistic Committee) ’ a b ch ch’ d dl dz d̲z̲ e f g gh gw h i j k k’ kh kw kw’ l lh m n ng o oo p r s s̲ sh t t’ tl tl’ ts ts’ t̲s̲ t̲s̲’ u w wh y z z̲
The only diacritic it uses in its standard form is the underscore, which is written under the sibilants (, , , and ) to indicate that the consonant is laminal denti-alveolar rather than apical alveolar. An acute accent is sometimes used to mark high tone, but tone is not routinely written in Dakeł. The southern dialect uses a modified version of the alphabet.
+ Southern Carrier alphabet a b ch ch’ d dl dz e g gh gw h i j k k’ kh kw kw’ l lh m n o oo s sh t t’ tl tl’ ts ts’ u w wh y z ’
Carrier was formerly written in a writing system inspired by the Cree Syllabics known variously as the Carrier syllabics or Déné Syllabics. This writing system was widely used for several decades from its inception in 1885 but began to fade in the 1930s. Today few in the community use or read it.
A good deal of scholarly material, together with the first edition of the 'Little Catechism' and the third edition of a 'Prayerbook', is written in the writing system used by the missionary priest Adrien-Gabriel Morice in his scholarly work. This writing system was a somewhat idiosyncratic version of the phonetic transcription of the time. It is subphonemic and was never used by Carrier people themselves, though many learned to read the Prayerbook in it. (citation)
Morphology
Nouns Dakelh nouns are inflected for possession, including the person and number of the possessor. Possession is marked by prefixation as well, in some cases, as changes in the noun stem. Number is marked only on nouns denoting human beings and dogs, and these distinguish only singular and plural. Some dialects of Dakelh have no number distinctions in nouns at all.
A noun has six basic personal possessive forms:
+ Possessive Paradigm of sticksingularplural1st person2nd person3rd person
Reading row-wise, these mean "my stick", "our stick", "your (1 person) stick", "your (two or more people) stick", "his/her/its stick", and "their stick".
However, in some dialects, such as that of Stony Creek, there is a distinction between first person dual and first person plural possessors:
+ Possessive Paradigm of stick(Stoney Creek dialect)singulardualplural1st person2nd person3rd person
In such dialects, while the 1d and 1p are distinct, the 1d is the same as the 2dp.
There are five additional third person possessive forms:
ArealReflexiveDisjointPlural disjointReciprocal
The areal form is used when the possessor is saliently areal, spatial, or an extent of time. The reflexive is used when the subject of the clause and the possessor are the same, whether singular or plural. The disjoint form is used when both subject and possessor are third person singular and are not the same. The plural disjoint form is used when the subject is third person plural, the possessor is third person singular, and the possessor is not one of the individuals in the subject group. The reciprocal form, meaning "each other's", was used into the early twentieth century but has since fallen out of use.
The twelfth possessive form is almost always found on inalienably possessed nouns. These are nouns that may not occur as words in their own right. In Dakelh, the great majority of such nouns are either body parts or kinship terms. For example, although we can abstract the stem from forms for "foot" such as ('my foot'), ('our feet'), and ('his foot'), by itself is not a word. It must either occur with a possessive prefix or as part of a compound, such as ('sock'). To refer to an inalienably possessed noun without specifying its owner, the indefinite possessive prefix is used. The approximate equivalent of "a foot" is therefore .
To describe alienable possession of an inalienably possessed noun, the regular possessive forms are used with the indefinite form as a base rather than the bare stem. Thus, to say "my foot" if the foot is not your own foot but is, for example, a rabbit's foot, you would say . (The fact that the vowel is rather than is the result of a phonological rule that changes to immediately preceding in noun prefixes and in the disjunct zone of the verb.)
Most Dakelh nouns do not have distinct singular and plural forms. How many items are under discussion may be inferred from context or may be specified by using a number or quantifier; otherwise, it remains ambiguous. With very limited exceptions, only nouns denoting human beings and dogs have distinct plural forms.
The most common way of forming the plural is by adding the suffix . Thus, we have "man", "men", "Dakelh person", "Dakelh people".
Nouns derived from verbs by adding the suffix form their plurals by replacing with . Thus we have "teacher", "teachers".
A smaller but nonetheless considerable number of nouns take the plural suffix , e.g. "dog", "dogs". This is the usual way of making the plural of kinship terms, e.g. "our mother", "our mothers". The plural suffix is occasionally heard on kinship terms, but the suffix is more widely used and generally considered to be more correct. The plural of "dog" is invariably , never .
In addition, there are a handful of nouns with irregular plurals:
Singular Plural Gloss wife young man younger brother ancestor friend young woman woman
"wife" is also found with the more regular plural . is sometimes found with the double plural . "parent, ancestor" is also found with the undoubled plural .
The exceptions to the statement that only nouns denoting human beings and dogs have distinct plurals are all nouns derived from verbs. The form of the underlying verb may vary with number in such a way as to create distinct number forms for the derived noun.