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Na-Dené (also '''Na-Dene''', '''Nadene''', '''Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit''') is a Native American Language Family which includes the Athabaskan Languages , Eyak , and Tlingit . FAMILY DIVISION The Na-Dene family includes:
Navajo is the most widely spoken language of the Na-Dené family, spoken in Arizona , New Mexico , and other regions of the American Southwest. Dene or Dine is a widely distributed group of Native languages and peoples spoken in Canada , Alaska , and parts of Oregon and northern California . Eyak is spoken in the Alaskan panhandle and today there is only one speaker left. GENETIC RELATION PROPOSALS Haida , with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally included in the proposed family by Franz Boas . Most linguists today consider the evidence inconclusive and have classified it as a Language Isolate , however Joseph Greenberg reincluded Haida based on his Mass Lexical Comparison research. To emphasise the exclusion of Haida the family is often termed ''Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit''. According to Greenberg's controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Na-Dené-Athabaskan is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas, and represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The other two are the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family, spoken in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, and Amerind , Greenberg's most controversial classification which includes every language native to the Americas that is not Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dené. Contemporary supporters of Greenberg's theory such as Merritt Ruhlen have suggested that the Na-Dené language family represents a distinct migration of people from Asia to the New World. The time of this migration is estimated to have been six to eight thousand years ago, placing it around four thousand later than the initial population of the continents by Amerind speakers. Ruhlen speculates that the Na-Dené speakers may have arrived in boats, initially settling near the Queen Charlotte Islands , now in British Columbia , Canada . {Link without Title} According to the similarly controversial theory of Sergei Starostin , Na-Dené is a member of the Dene-Caucasian superfamily, along with the North Caucasian Languages , Sino-Tibetan Languages , Yeniseian Languages and Basque . This idea was considered by Edward Sapir . Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University suggests that these languages are related to Yeniseian (or Yeniseic) languages in Siberia , which would also support the controversial theory of Starostin and others. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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