Hän

This language is spoken by the Hän Hwëch’in people on both sides of the Alaska-Yukon border, in the Dawson city area. The writing system follows the typical Dene system of marking tone and nasalisation. There seem to be two different versions of this writing system: Alaskan and Yukon. The few differences will be discussed in the table below.

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.

This page uses no characters outside the Unicode standard.

Notes:

• The Alaskan orthography is different on a number of accounts.
  • The high-mid central vowel [ɜ] is written 〈ë〉 in grammatical prefixes, but 〈ö〉 elsewhere.
  • The voiced resonants are written double at the end of a word, while the voiceless resonant in the same position is written with a single letter. Thus Yukon 〈khay〉 would be Alaska 〈khayy〉.
  • Vowels are written double when at the end of a word.
  • The voiceless 〈wh〉 is 〈hw〉 in Alaska.
  • Glottal stops are not written at the end of a word following a syllable with a low tone vowel.
• The glottal stop 〈’〉 is not written word initially.
• Tone is as follows: high tone is unmarked, low tone is indicated by the gràve accent, rising tone is written with a cǎron accent, a falling tone by a cîrcumflex.
• Nasalised vowels are indicated by a subscript ǫgonek accent.
• The diphthong 〈ay〉 is pronounced as if it were 〈äy〉 [ʌj].
• The exact status of the vowels /ä/ and /a/ is unclear. One source treats /ä/ as a low front vowel and /a/ as English as a low back vowel, while another source reverses the pronunciations. The positions I have assigned to these vowels in the table above is based on the informal pronunciation guide in Eagle Han Huch’inn Hòdök.