Where is Dena'ina spoken?

Dena'ina (Denaʼinaqʼ) is an Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language, spoken in the United States. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Dena'ina is spoken

Dena'ina is spoken in one country: the United States.

On the map, Dena'ina is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Dena'ina.

How many people speak Dena'ina?

Wikidata gives about 75 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Nearly extinct. Glottolog lists it as nearly extinct: only a few elderly speakers are left.

Where Dena'ina sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Dena'ina as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
  2. Athabaskan-Eyak
  3. Athabaskan
  4. Southern Alaskan Athabaskan
  5. Dena'ina

Related languages

Other languages in the Southern Alaskan Athabaskan group:

More about Dena'ina

Codes: ISO 639-3 tfn, Glottolog tana1289. Glottolog macroarea: North America.

Questions about Dena'ina

Where is Dena'ina spoken?

Dena'ina is spoken in the United States. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Dena'ina?

Wikidata gives about 75 speakers (Wikidata, with no source given, 2007). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Dena'ina in?

Glottolog places Dena'ina in the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, in the branch Athabaskan-Eyak, Athabaskan and Southern Alaskan Athabaskan.

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