The Dene languages (ISO 639-2 ath)
The DSA is an NSF funded atlas of Dene (formerly Athabaskan) speaking communities in northern North America, originally in the Mackenzie River drainage basin. These languages belong to the tone group of the Dene languages, which are primarily those Dene communities in Northwest Territories and the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Dene languages in the American Southwest (Navajo and Apache) are also tone languages.
There are five principle languages in the northern region covered by the Atlas:
- Dene Sųłiné (Chipewyan)
- North Slavey dialects
- South Slavey
- Tłį Chǫ (Dogrib)
- TsuuT’ina (Sarcee)
The DSA is online.
The DSA is intended to provide baseline information about the characteristic properties and structure of the Dene sound system and to demonstrate how the sounds are pronounced by flent native speakers. This information includes the documentation of the pronunciation of the phonemes of the languages, tone and prosody. This type information is not recoverable from text or orthographies, including the IPA orthography.
This is an ongoing project. Dene communities will be added as data from Dene speakers is collected and transcribed.
