The Dakelh language is spoken in a large territory in central British Columbia, from Stewart lake in the north to the area around the city of Quesnel in the south-east. There are two major dialects: Central, and Southern, both of which will be covered on this page. Witsuwit’en-Nedut’en (Northern or Western Carrier) is occasionally classified as a dialect of Carrier, but this site will list it as a separate language.
The traditional orthography of the Carrier languages is syllabics introduced by A.-G. Morice in 1885 at Stuart Lake (Central dialect). His desire to redesign syllabics was in response to the difficulties in writing Dene langauges in Algonquian based orthographical systems, which have fewer consonant sounds. Currently, there is also a Roman orthography in use. Below the Roman orthography is used to exemplify pronunciation. For the syllabics, please see the link to the right.
Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.
ISO 639-3 language codes
crx = Central Carrier
caf = Southern Carrier
Syllabics Information
Demographics
The Canadian Census counts 2,490 Carrier speakers in 2006, up from from 2,055 in 2001. These figures likely include Wet’suwet’en-Nat’ooten as well. According to Howe and Cook, there are 1,250 Carrier/Dakelh speakers.
Central Carrier Consonants
| bilabial | dental affricate | alveolar | alveolar affricate | lateral | palato-alveolar | palatal | velar | velar rounded | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| voiceless stop | b | d̲z̲ | d | dz | dl | j | g | gw | ’ | |
| aspirated stop | (p) | t̲s̲ | t | ts | tl | ch | k | kw | ||
| ejective stop | t̲s̲’ | t’ | ts’ | tl’ | ch’ | k’ | kw’ | |||
| voiced fricative | z̲ | z | gh | ghw | ||||||
| voiceless fricative | (f) | s̲ | s | lh | sh | kh | wh | h | ||
| nasal | m | n | ny | ng | ||||||
| resonant | (r) | l | y | w |
Central Carrier Vowels
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| high | i | oo | |
| mid | e | u | o |
| low | a |
Notes
- This chart is based on the speech of conservative speakers from Poser (2003). Many speakers may have /n/+/y/ instead of /ny/. Thus ‘your land’ is /n-yun/ (two syllables) but ‘you’ is /nyun/ (one syllable). /ny/ is used only when indicating a second person singular.
- Some older speakers retain /ghw/, for others, it has merged with /w/.
- Sounds in parentheses are found only in loan words.
- Phonemic tone does exist in Dakelh – some words are distinguished only by a high-pitch or low-pitch vowel. However, most tones are predictable, and there are only a few instances where tone changes the meaning of a word. Though tone can be indicated in the orthography (by an acúte accent for high tone) many writers leave this diacritic mark out when writing.
- At least in some dialects, there are contrasting long and short vowels which occur due to underlying grammatical processes: nuchateske ‘he is not going to go around in a boat” ~ nucha:teske ‘they are not going to go around in a boat’. The long vowels are very rare, and not indicated in writing. Poser (p.c.)
Southern Carrier Consonants
| bilabial | alveolar | alveolar affricate | lateral | palato-alveolar | palatal | velar | velar rounded | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| voiceless stop | b | d | dz | dl | j | g | gw | ’ | |
| aspirated stop | (p) | t | ts | tl | ch | k | kw | ||
| ejective stop | t’ | ts’ | tl’ | ch’ | k’ | kw’ | |||
| voiced fricative | z | gh | |||||||
| voiceless fricative | (f) | s | lh | sh | kh | wh | h | ||
| nasal | m | n | |||||||
| resonant | (r) | l | y | w |
Southern Carrier Vowels
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| high | i | oo | |
| mid | e | u | o |
| low | a |
Notes
- Southern Carrier differs from the Central dialect in that it does not have the dental affricate series of sounds. There is no /ng/, /ghw/, or /ny/.
- Sounds in parentheses are found only in loan words.
