The Tsetsaut language is an extinct Athabaskan language formerly spoken by the now-extinct Tsetsaut in the Behm and Portland Canal area of Southeast Alaska and northwestern British Columbia. Virtually everything known of the language comes from the limited material recorded by Franz Boas in 1894 from two Tsetsaut slaves of the Nisga'a, which is enough to establish that Tsetsaut formed its own branch of Athabaskan. It is not known precisely when the language became extinct, but it was around the 1930s.D. Roy Mitchell IV, "Alaska's 23 Indigenous Languages", March 9, 2023. One speaker was still alive in 1927. The Nisga'a name for the Tsetsaut people is "Jits'aawit".
The Tsetsaut referred to themselves as the . The English name Tsetsaut is an anglicization of , "those of the interior", used by the Gitxsan and Nisga'a to refer to the Athabaskan-speaking people to the north and east of them, including not only the Tsetsaut but some Tahltan and Sekani.
Vocabulary The examples by Merritt Ruhlen:
fish grizzly bear male deer rabbit snake frog mosquito tsrāmaʔ wasp at’ɔ nest εkyagɔ ankle aɬʼɔqʼ liver dlε dance kwuɬʼ dirt na mother täʼ father isča grandchild axa hair aɬa(ʔ) hand txa kick mmē lake xutsʼedeʼ left
Bibliography
Collison, W. H. (1915) In the Wake of the War Canoe: A Stirring Record of Forty Years' Successful Labour, Peril and Adventure amongst the Savage Indian Tribes of the Pacific Coast, and the Piratical Head-Hunting Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. Toronto: Musson Book Company. Reprinted by Sono Nis Press, Victoria, B.C. (ed. by Charles Lillard), 1981. Dangeli, Reginald (1999) "Tsetsaut History: The Forgotten Tribe of Southern Southeast Alaska." In: Alaska Native Writers, Storytellers & Orators: The Expanded Edition, ed. by Ronald Spatz, Jeane Breinig, and Patricia H. Partnow, pp. 48–54. Anchorage: University of Alaska.
References
External links First Nations Languages of British Columbia page OLAC resources in and about the Tsetsaut language