Guide to the General Alaska Native Languages Collection

Container List

This section is devoted to works dealing with many or all of the native languages of Alaska, and including languages from both the Eskimo-Aleut and Athabaskan-Eyak (or Na-Dene) groupings. Works which deal exclusively with either Eskimo-Aleut or Athabaskan-Eyak (Na-Dene) groupings will be found in the sections on Comparative Eskimo and Comparative Athabaskan respectively.

The General section is quite small and selective. We have made no attempt to include all discussions of Alaska native languages in general, but only those which are especially interesting and historically influential: e.g. Veniaminov, repeated often, and Dall, reflected in the Library of Congress cataloguing system. Only works which address the languages with some emphasis are considered; we have not included statements about Alaska native groups, especially the more recent ones, which are predominantly ethnographic. There have moreover been a number of maps of the native groups of Alaska published, but only two of these, published a century apart, are noted here, as they are the main ones which make an attempt to define language boundaries and affiliations in some detail.

A minor category of items included in the General section are those involving multiple wordlists which include languages representing more than one of the major language families of Alaska, for example the compendium of 100-word lists prepared by SIL in the 1960's.

[Krauss and McGary 1980]