Athapaskan migration to the North American Sout

The arrival of the ancestors of the Apaches and Navajo to the North American Southwest, the so-called Apachean migra-tion is one of the most widely discussed issues in American archeology. Since the 19th century, after connections were disco-vered between the Athabaskan language family, potential routes and directions of migration between the Arctic and Subarctic region (inhabited by the Northern Athabaskans) and the Southwest (inhabited by the Southern Athabaskans) began to be con-sidered. During the 1930s, the Edward Sapir’s linguistic research made it possible to determine that the migration flowed from north to south, but this conclusion merely sowed the seed of research on Apachean migration, which has since blossomed with archaeological discoveries from the last 20 or 30 years. Today, we are able to pinpoint what prompted the Athabaskans’ journey; we also know of cultures such as Promontory (around the Great Salt Lake) or Dismal River (Great Plains), which we associate with the presence of the Apachean people on both sides of the Rocky Mountains. Still, many questions remain unanswered, and previous hypotheses are being verified in the light of new discoveries. No less interesting proved the results of research into some auxiliary sciences of archeology: genetics and linguistics, and the analysis of historical sources and oral tradition.The following article aims to introduce the reader to the most important and recent discoveries related to the issue of Apachean migration, and present hypotheses that have recently emerged in the scientific community, both in the context of the migration route itself and arrival in the Southwest, as well as the dates associated with them.

Western Apache, a Southern Athabaskan Language

Western Apache belongs to the Southern or Apachean branch of the Athabaskan language family, (Nadene phylum) and is spoken by ca. 6,000 people in central and eastern Arizona, USA. Since there are very few children acquiring the language, it is endangered. The Western Apache noun word is morphologically simple, but the verb word is unusually complex. It can be characterized morphologically by what Sapir called “interrupted synthesis”, that is, a complex interdigitation of functionally diverse prefixal elements: inflectional prefixes, derivational prefixes, and thematic prefixes. Furthermore, the Athabaskan polysynthetic word is also characterized by extensive fusion or contraction of short prefix elements, prefix slippage, and haplology. As a result, the Athabaskan verb word is often between two and four syllables long, which is quite short when compared to words in more “orthodox” polysynthetic language families (Woodbury, Chapter 30, this volume) such as Eskimo-Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Wakashan.

Deg Xinag Rounding Assimilation: A case study in phonologization

Acoustic and video evidence suggest that Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language, contains Rounding Assimilation, rounding of schwa before a stressed rounded vowel across uvular or laryngeal consonants. Although Rounding Assimilation has received no mention in previous Deg Xinag studies, it appears to be at stage II, phonologization, in the model of sound change proposed by Hyman (1976). Data from the related language Babine-Witsuwit'en is also presented, showing an absence of Rounding Assimilation in one of the contexts where it occurs in Deg Xinag. Babine-Witsuwit'en sheds light on how and why Rounding Assimilation may have developed historically in Deg Xinag.

A gestural account of the velar fricative in Navajo

Using the framework of Articulatory Phonology, we offer a phonological account of the allophonic variation undergone by the velar fricative phoneme in Navajo, a Southern or Apachean Athabaskan language spoken in Arizona and New Mexico. The Navajo velar fricative strongly co-articulates with the following vowel, varying in both place and manner of articulation. The variation in this velar fricative seems greater than the variation of velars in many well-studied languages. The coronal central fricatives in the inventory, in contrast, are quite phonetically stable. The back fricative of Navajo thus highlights 1) the linguistic use of an extreme form of coarticulation and 2) the mechanism by which languages can control coarticulation. It is argued that the task dynamic model underlying Articulatory Phonology, with the mechanism of gestural blending controlling coarticulation, can account for the multiplicity of linguistically-controlled ways in which velars coarticulate with surrounding vowels without requiring any changes of input specification due to context. The ability of phonological and morphological constraints to restrict the amount of coarticulation argues against strict separation of phonetics and phonology.