Editing Tlingit language (section)

==Dialects==
Tlingit is divided into roughly five major dialects, all of which are essentially mutually intelligible:
* The Northern dialect is also called the Yakutat (''Yakhwdaat'') dialect, after its principal town and is spoken in an area south from [[Lituya Bay]] (''Litu.aa'') to [[Frederick Sound]].
* The Transitional dialect, a two-tone dialect like the Northern dialect but has phonological features of the Southern, is historically spoken in the villages of [[Petersburg, Alaska|Petersburg]] (''Gántiyaakw Séedi'' "Steamboat Canyon"), [[Kake, Alaska|Kake]] (''Khéixh' '' "Daylight"), and [[Wrangell, Alaska|Wrangell]] (''Khaachxhana.áak'w'' "Khaachxhan's Little Lake"), and in the surrounding regions although it has almost disappeared.
* The similarly-moribund Southern dialects of ''Sanya'' and ''Heinya'' are spoken from [[Sumner Strait]] south to the Alaska-Canada border, excepting [[Annette Island]], which is the reservation of the [[Tsimshian]], and the southern end of [[Prince of Wales Island (Alaska)|Prince of Wales Island]], which is the land of the Kaigani [[Haida people|Haida]] (''K'aayk'aani'').
* The [[Inland Tlingit]] dialect is spoken in Canada around [[Atlin Lake]] and [[Teslin Lake]].
* The Tongass Tlingit dialect was once spoken in the Cape Fox area south of [[Ketchikan, Alaska|Ketchikan]] but recently died with its last speakers in the 1990s.

The various dialects of Tlingit can be classified roughly into two-tone and three-tone systems. Tongass Tlingit, however, has no tone but a four-way [[register (phonology)|register]] contrast between short, long, glottalized, and "fading" vowels. (In the last type, the onset of the vowel is articulated normally but the release is [[murmured voice|murmured]], essentially a rapid opening of the glottis once articulation is begun.)

The tone values in two-tone dialects can be predicted in some cases from the three-tone values but not the reverse. Earlier, it was hypothesized that the three-tone dialects were older and that the two-tone dialects evolved from them. However, [[Jeff Leer]]'s discovery of the Tongass dialect in the late 1970s has shown{{citation needed|date=September 2015}} that the Tongass vowel system is adequate to predict the tonal features of both the two-tone and three-tone dialects, but none of the tonal dialects could be used to predict vocalic feature distribution in Tongass Tlingit. Thus, Tongass Tlingit is the most conservative of the various dialects of Tlingit, preserving contrasts which have been lost in the other dialects.

The fading and glottalized vowels in Tongass Tlingit have also been compared with similar systems in the [[Coast Tsimshian dialect]]. However, Krauss and Leer (1981, p.&nbsp;165) point out that the fading vowels in Coastal Tsimshian are the surface realization of [[underlying representation|underlying]] sequences of vowel and glottalized sonorant, {{IPA|VʔC}}. That is in contradistinction to the glottal modifications in Tongass Tlingit, which Leer argues are symmetric with the modifications of the consonantal system. Thus, a fading vowel {{IPA|V̤}} is symmetric{{clarify|date=September 2015}} with an aspirated consonant {{IPA|Cʰ}}, and a glottalized vowel {{IPA|Vʔ}} is symmetric with an ejective (glottalized) consonant {{IPA|Cʼ}}. That implies that the two systems have no familial relationship. Leer (1978) speculated that the maintenance of the pretonal system in Tongass Tlingit was caused by the proximity of its speakers around the Cape Fox area near the mouth of the [[Portland Canal]] to speakers of Coastal Tsimshian, just to the south.