Dogrib, the English translation of the indigenous name (tɬʰĩtʃʰõ jatʰîː), is a Northern Athabaskan language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

 spoken by the First Nations

First Nations

First Nations is a term that collectively refers to various Aboriginal peoples in Canada who are neither Inuit nor Métis. There are currently over 630 recognised First Nations governments or bands spread across Canada, roughly half of which are in the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia. The...

 Tłı̨chǫ people of the Canadian territory Northwest Territories

Northwest Territories

The Northwest Territories is a federal territory of Canada.Located in northern Canada, the territory borders Canada's two other territories, Yukon to the west and Nunavut to the east, and three provinces: British Columbia to the southwest, and Alberta and Saskatchewan to the south...

. According to Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada is the Canadian federal government agency commissioned with producing statistics to help better understand Canada, its population, resources, economy, society, and culture. Its headquarters is in Ottawa....

 in 2006, there were approximately 2,640 people who spoke Dogrib.

The Dogrib region covers the northern shore of Great Slave Lake

Great Slave Lake

Great Slave Lake is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada , the deepest lake in North America at , and the ninth-largest lake in the world. It is long and wide. It covers an area of in the southern part of the territory. Its given volume ranges from to and up to ...

, reaching almost up to Great Bear Lake

Great Bear Lake

Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely within Canada , the third or fourth largest in North America, and the seventh or eighth largest in the world...

. Rae-Edzo, now known by its Dogrib name, Behchokǫ̀, is the largest community in the Dogrib Region.

Consonants

The consonants of Dogrib in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets):

		Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Post- alveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....		Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
			central	lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....			plain	labialized
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...	plain	m  /m/	n  /n/
	prenasalized	mb  /ᵐb/	nd  /ⁿd/
Plosive	voiced	b  /b/	d  /d/				g  /ɡ/	gw  /ɡʷ/
	voiceless		t  /t/				k  /k/	kw  /kʷ/	’  /ʔ/
	ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants...		t’  /tʼ/				k’  /kʼ/	kw’  /kʷʼ/
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...	voiced		dz  /dz/	dl  /dɮ/	j  /dʒ/
	voiceless		ts  /ts/	tl  /tɬ/	ch  /tʃ/
	ejective		ts’  /tsʼ/	tl’  /tɬʼ/	ch’  /tʃʼ/
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	voiced		z  /z/		zh  /ʒ/		gh  /ɣ/
	voiceless		s  /s/	ł  /ɬ/	sh  /ʃ/		x  /x/		h  /h/
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...	voiced		r  /ɹ/	l  /l/		y  /j/		w  /w/
	voiceless							wh  /ʍ/

Vowels

• short
  • a /a/
  • e /e/
  • ı /i/
  • o /o/
  • ą /ã/
  • ę /ẽ/
  • ı̨ /ĩ/
  • ǫ /õ/
• long
  • aa /aː/
  • ee /eː/
  • ıı /iː/
  • oo /oː/
  • ąą /ãː/
  • ęę /ẽː/
  • ı̨ı̨ /ĩː/
  • ǫǫ /õː/
• nasal vowels are marked by an ogonek
  Ogonek
  The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.-Use:...
  
   (called wighǫą - 'its little nose' in Dogrib) e.g., ą
• low tone is marked with a grave accent
  Grave accent
  The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
  
   (called wets'aà - 'its hat' in Dogrib), e.g., à
• high tone is never marked

Grammar

Typologically

Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...

, Dogrib is an agglutinating

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

, polysynthetic

Polysynthetic language

In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...

 head-marking language

Head-marking language

A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...

, but many of its affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

es combine into contractions more like fusional language

Fusional language

A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....

s. The canonical word order of Dogrib is SOV. Dogrib words are modified primarily by prefixes, which is unusual for an SOV language (suffixes are expected).

In addition to verbs and nouns, there are pronoun

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...

s, clitic

Clitic

In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...

s of various functions, demonstrative

Demonstrative

In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...

s, numerals

Number names

In linguistics, number names are specific words in a natural language that represent numbers.In writing, numerals are symbols also representing numbers...

, postpositions, adverb

Adverb

An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....

s, and conjunction

Grammatical conjunction

In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...

s in Dogrib. The class of adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s is very small, probably around two dozen words: most descriptive words are verbs rather than adjectives.

Examples

• Tłı̨chǫ got'ı̨ı̨̀ Tłı̨chǫ people
• tłı̨ dog
• tłı̨cho horse (literally: 'big dog')
• łıwe / łıe fish
• detʼǫ duck
• eyè egg
• ejietʼò milk
• dìga wolf
• tʼooh poplar
• deh river
• elà canoe
• dı island
• kwe rock
• sìh / shìh mount
• tı lake
• zhah snow
• chǫ / tsǫ rain
• ło smoke
• kǫ̀ house
• degoo white
• dezǫ black
• dekʼo red

Trivia

In a discussion of the words "Nohtsi Naowo" note-see na-whoa; meaning “God’s rule” or “God’s authority”),
"Nohtsi Wek’e" (note-see wek-ay; meaning “God’s way”) and
"Nohtsi K’aowo" (note-see ka-whoa), Shawn Maclellan comments:
"George [Tatsiechele] explains it this way, “When someone is arguing
with you on a matter that you know is true, and won’t listen to what
you have to say, the only thing you can say is Nohtsi K’aowo,
God is the boss!”"

See also

• Languages of Canada
• Indigenous languages of the Americas
  Indigenous languages of the Americas
  Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
  
  

Further reading

• Saxon, Leslie and Mary Siemens. Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì Multimedia Dictionary http://tlicho.ling.uvic.ca/.

External links

• Dogrib at Ethnologue