About the Tanacross Language

Tanacross is ancestral language of the middle Tanana valley in eastern interior Alaska, including the current and former villages of Tanacross, Mansfield, Ketchumstuck, Joseph, Healy Lake, and Dot Lake. It shares many similarities with neighboring languages belonging to the Dene (Athabascan) family, including Lower Tanana, Ahtna, Han, and Upper Tanana. However, Tanacross is readily distinguished from other Athabascan languages by the presence of unique tonal patterns. For example, the Tanacross word for ‘willow ptarmigan’ is k’étmah, with a sequence of high pitch (tone) followed by low pitch. While other Dene languages may have very similar words for ‘willow ptarmigan’, Tanacross is the only Dene language in Alaska to show this distinct tone pattern.

You will see that the grammar of Tanacross is very different from that of English. Tanacross words are composed of a stem, which may preceded by one or more prefixes. For example, the word nantneg’íił ‘I’ll see you again’ is composed of several parts. The stem is -‘íił, which together with the rightmost n- means ‘to see’. Then, proceeding left to right through the word: the na- at the beginning of the word means ‘again’; the second n- means ‘you’; the t- refers to the future; and the eg- means ‘I’. And yet, none of the pieces of this word can stand alone as an individual word. So one Tanacross word may correspond to an entire phrase in English. In particular, Tanacross does not generally use independent pronouns to refer to ‘I’, ‘you’, etc. Instead, these referents are built into the verb. Furthermore, there is no distinction between ‘he’ and ‘she’. The word nach’e’áał can mean both ‘he is eating’ and ‘she is eating’. For this reason the English translations of some phrases in this booklet must arbitrarily assign a pronoun ‘he’ or ‘she’.

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