Tagish language
| Tagish | |
|---|---|
| Dene K'e | |
| Tā̀gish | |
| Native to | Canada |
| Region | Northwest Territories, Yukon |
| Ethnicity | Tagish people |
| Extinct | 2008, with the death of Lucy Wren |
Dené–Yeniseian?
| |
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | tgx |
| Glottolog | tagi1240 |
| ELP | Tagish |
Tagish is classified as Extinct by UNESCO. | |
Tagish is an extinct Athabaskan language spoken by the Tagish or Carcross-Tagish, a First Nations people that historically lived in the Northwest Territories and Yukon in Canada. The Tagish people refer to themselves as /ta:gizi dene/, literally "Tagish people", where /ta:gizi/ is a place name meaning "it (spring ice) is breaking up".
The language is a Northern Athabaskan language, closely related to Tahltan and Kaska. The three languages are often grouped together as Tahltan-Kaska-Tagish; the three languages are sometimes considered dialects of the same language. As of 2004, there was only 1 native fluent speaker of Tagish documented: Lucy Wren (Agaymā/Ghùch Tlâ). She died in 2008.
The Tagish language includes nouns, verbs, and particles. Particles and nouns are single, sometimes compounded, morphemes, but the difference is that nouns can be inflected and particles cannot. Verbs are the most complex class in this language because their stemmed morphemes have many prefixes which indicate inflectional and derivational categories.