TLINGIT 

 By John R. S wanton 



§1. DISTRIBUTION 



The Tlingit or Koluschan language is spoken throughout south- 

 eastern Alaska, from Dixon entrance and Portland canal to Copper 

 river, with the exception of the south end of Prince of Wales island, 

 which is occupied by Haida. An interior tribe of British Columbia, 

 the Tagish, are said to belong to the same linguistic stock, but it is 

 by no means certain that they have not adopted the language from 

 their Chilkat neighbors. Such a change is said, at an}^ rate, to have 

 taken place in the the language of the Ugalakmiut, or Ugalentz, of 

 Kayak island and the neighboring mainland, who were formerly 

 Eskimo and have now become thoroughly Tlingitized. 



The principal part of the material on which this sketch is based 

 was obtained at Sitka, but I also have considerable material from 

 Wrangell, and one long story from Yakutat. Although each town 

 appears to have had certain dialectic peculiarities, it would appear 

 that the language nowhere varied very widely and that the differences 

 were mainly confined to the different arrangement and handling of 

 particles; the lexical changes being comparatively few and the 

 structure practically uniform. The greatest divergence is said to 

 exist between the Yakutat people on the one hand and the people of 

 Wrangell and the other southern towns on the other — the speech at 

 Sitka, Huna, Chilkat, Auk, Taku, and Killisnoo being intermediate — 

 but I have not enough material to establish the entire accuracy of 

 this classification. Anciently the people belonging to this stock, or a 

 part of them, lived at the mouths of the Nass and Skeena rivers, on 

 the coast now occupied by the Tsimshian, and the universal 

 acknowledgment of this by the people themselves is probably evidence 

 that it was at no very ancient date. Perhaps this recent spread of 

 the people is responsible for the comparative uniformity of their 



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