Tlingit grammar

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The Tlingit language is a Na-Dene language spoken by the Tlingit people who are indigenous to most of Southeast Alaska. Its grammar has features similar to that of other languages belonging to the Northwest Coast Sprachbund, including SOV word order, a rich aspectual system, and optional plural marking. The grammar is also similar to other Na-Dene languages like Eyak and the Athabaskan languages, for instance in their shared complexity of verb morphology.

Nouns in Tlingit can be divided into two open classes, possessable and unpossessable. This division is based on whether a particular noun may have a possessed relationship with another noun, both syntactically and semantically. In Tlingit the names for people and places are unpossessable, while other nouns may be either optionally or obligatorily possessed (called alienable and inalienable, respectively). Most nouns in Tlingit are alienable, i.e., they may be used alone or may be possessed by another noun. In contrast, inalienable nouns cannot appear without a possessor. Inalienable nouns commonly refer to kinship terms and body parts.

A notable feature of inalienable nouns is that they are not normally marked for possession; that is, they do not take the possessed -ÿi suffix, as the possessive relationship is implicit in the meaning of the noun. However, if the possessed suffix is used on an inalienable noun, the meaning changes from being part of a body to a body part that is somehow separated from the rest of the body. Thus xóots shá means "a bear's head", but xóots shayí means "a bear's head (detached from its body)".

A plural suffix -xʼ exists which may be attached to most nouns, however it is not usually used. A few nouns are treated as singular/plural pairs, e.g. khaa/khaaxʼw "person"/"people", du yádi/du yátxʼi "his child"/"his children".

Tlingit has a complex system of pronominals, or pronouns, which vary depending on their relationship to syntactic categories including the verb,[1] in addition to relative agency in the third-person pronouns.[2] The subject pronominals are incorporated into the verb in its subject slot.[1] They are divided into three classes: the verbal object, nominal object, and postpositional object. There are also independent pronominals which are completely separate from the verb; they can be used in dependent clauses or in subject or object position.

The pronominals can be visualized in the following table.[1][3]

The first and second person pronominals both have a distinction between singular and plural.[3] The third person pronominals, which in object form are distinguished as neutral, recessive, and salient, communicate agency and salience.[2] The third person may be pluralized by the addition of the word has before the verb,[5] although the plural is often communicated in other ways.[6] The indefinite pronominals are a type of fourth person and distinguish between human and non-human referents.[3]

The subject pronominals are all incorporated into the verb. Thus, when the subject is represented as a pronominal, the syntactic subject position of the sentence is empty. Object pronominals are divided into three classes: the verbal (VO), nominal (NO), and postpositional (PO).[citation needed] The verbal object pronominals function similarly to the subject pronominals in that they are incorporated into the verb and leave the syntactic object position empty when used. The nominal object pronominals are similar to the possessive pronouns of English. Postpositional object pronominals act as the object of a postposition.

Possessed nouns take the -i suffix and are preceded by the appropriate nominal object pronominal. For example:

• ax̱ dóoshi = my cat
• haa héeni = our river
• du lʼee xʼwáni = his/her socks

There is only one class of third person subject in Tlingit,[7] but there are three classes of third person object (neutral, recessive, and salient). This system of object pronominals exist in parallel to similar systems (called "anaphora") in many Athabaskan languages, including in Navajo.[2] All these anaphora have roots in Proto Na-Dene,[8] although Tlingit has a particularly complex system.[2]

In the system, a referent can be either an agent or a non-agent.[2] Agents can only be humans, supernatural beings, natural forces, or personified animals; by contrast, a non-agent is anything else, including other animals, inanimate objects, plants, places, and ideas. Non-agents may only be referred to using the recessive pronominals, while the pronominal for an agent is determined by the presence and situation of saliency.[9]

Saliency is only considered when the following criteria are met:[9]

1. the subject is also third-person
2. both subject and object are agents
3. the subject and object are opposed in the discourse (i.e., they do not refer to the same thing).

If saliency is not considered, then the neutral pronominal is used for the agent object. If it is considered, then relative agency is used to determine which pronominal to use for the object. If the object has less agency than the subject, then the recessive pronominal is used; if it has more agency, then the salient pronominal is used.[10]

Consider a situation where the protagonist of a story (who has the most agency) is the object of a sentence, while someone else (with less agency) is the subject. Then a translation of "He found her" would be:[11]

In the opposite situation, where the subject has more agency than the object, a translation of the same sentence would be:[11]

Conversely, if a human speaker were to sit on a chair (which is inanimate), one could say:[12]

But if that same speaker sat on another person, one would say:[12]

Nominal cases in Tlingit are designated by postpositions, however they usually behave morphologically like suffixes.

Other postpositions function as separate words, and include:

• g̱óot — "without"
• náḵ — "away from"
• yís — "for"
• yáx̱ — "like, as much as, according to"
• yánáx̱ — "more than"
• ḵín — "less than"

In Tlingit, directionals are a semantic category which indicate direction relative to some stated position. The stated position can be some element of the natural environment, a structure, or a person or group of people. Syntactically, directionals are a subcategory of nouns because, like nouns, they can be arguments of verbs and objects of postpositions.[13] Some examples of directionals can be seen below.

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding missing information. (January 2026)

The classifier is a shared and defining feature of the Na-Dene languages. In all members, it has functions related to valency and voice, while in Tlingit it has the additional function of communicating stativity. The classifier has a misleading name, as its function is not a classificatory one. However, the terminology is conventional in both Tlingit and Athabaskan linguistics.

The table below represents the sixteen base forms of the Tlingit classifier, each of which is assigned a positive or negative value of S, D, and I (called components). A positive value represents presence of the component, while a negative value represents absence of the component. The broad functions of these components, respectively, are valency (S), voice (D), and stativity (I).

Particles function as neither noun nor verb. They are restricted to positions relative to phrases in the sentence.

The focus particles follow the left periphery of a sentence. Many of them may be suffixed with a demonstrative (-yá, -hé, -wé, -yú), and they may also be combined with the interrogative (-gé). For example:

• á — focus
• ágé — interrogative (< á + gé)
• ásgé — second hand information, "I hear...", "they say..." (< ásé + gé)
• ḵu.aa — contrastive, "however"
• óosh — hypothetical, "as if", "even if", "if only"

The focus particle sá is obligatory in forming wh-question phrases.

Phrasal particles may be either pre-phrasal or post-phrasal, meaning they are restricted to a position either before or after the phrase they modify, respectively. For example:

• tsú — "also"
• déi — "now", "this time"
• chʼas — "only", "just"
• tlax̱ — "very"

These particles may occur before or after any phrase in a clause. For example:

• tlei — "just," "simply," "just then"
• déi — "already," "by now"
• tsu — "again", "still", "some more"

Note that both the sentence káaxwei tsu eetéenaxh xhat yatee "I need more coffee" and the sentence káaxwei tsú eetéenaxh xhat yatee "I also need coffee" are acceptable, with tsu and tsú differentiated only on the basis of tone.

These particles may only occur at the front of a sentence. For example:

• tléik, l — negative, "not"
• gwál — dubitative, "perhaps"
• gu.aal — optative, "hopefully"
• ḵaju, x̱aju — contrary, "actually", "in fact"
• ḵashde — "I thought..."

Tlingit is by default an SOV language,[14] but nevertheless word order is quite flexible.[15] The SOV order is most apparent when object and (non-pronominal) agent phrases both exist in the sentence. However, there is a tendency to restrict the arguments of the verb phrase to a single non-pronominal noun phrase, with any other arguments being integrated into the verb. This can cause the appearance of an OSV word order, but it has been shown that this is not a correct analysis of Tlingit syntax.[14]