The Hän language is a Native American

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 endangered language

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

 spoken in only two places: Eagle, Alaska

Eagle, Alaska

Eagle is a city located along the United States-Canada border in the Southeast Fairbanks Census Area, Alaska, United States. It includes Eagle Historic District, a U.S. National Historic Landmark. The population was 129 at the 2000 census...

 and Dawson City, Yukon

Dawson City, Yukon

The Town of the City of Dawson or Dawson City is a town in the Yukon, Canada.The population was 1,327 at the 2006 census. The area draws some 60,000 visitors each year...

. There are only a few fluent speakers left (perhaps about 10), all of them elderly.

It is a member of the Athabaskan language family

Athabaskan languages

Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...

, which is part of the larger Na-Dené

Na-Dené languages

Na-Dene is a Native American language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. An inclusion of Haida is controversial....

 family. The name of the language is derived from the name of the people, "Hän Hwëch'in

Han (North American people)

The Han are a Northern Athabascan people who speak the Hän language. Only a handful of fluent speakers remain. Their traditional land centered around a heavily forested area around the Yukon River straddling what is now the Alaska-Yukon Territory border...

", which in the language means "people who live along the river", the river being the Yukon

Yukon River

The Yukon River is a major watercourse of northwestern North America. The source of the river is located in British Columbia, Canada. The next portion lies in, and gives its name to Yukon Territory. The lower half of the river lies in the U.S. state of Alaska. The river is long and empties into...

. There are currently efforts to revive the language locally.

Consonants

The consonants of Hän in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets):

		Bilabial	Interdental	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Postalveolar	Retroflex	Velar	Glottal
				central	lateral
Stop	voiceless	b  [p]		d  [t]				g  [k]	’  [ʔ]
	aspirated	(p)  [pʰ]		t  [tʰ]				k  [kʰ]
	ejective			t’  [tʼ]				k’  [kʼ]
Affricate	voiceless		ddh  [tθ]	dz  [ts]	dl  [tɬ]	dj  [tʃ]	dr  [ʈʂ]
	aspirated		tth  [tθʰ]	ts  [tsʰ]	tl  [tɬʰ]	ch  [tʃʰ]	tr  [ʈʂʰ]
	ejective		tth’  [tθʼ]	ts’  [tsʼ]	tl’  [tɬʼ]	ch’  [tʃʼ]	tr’  [ʈʂʼ]
Fricative	voiced		dh  [ð]	z  [z]	l  [ɮ]	zh  [ʒ]	zr  [ʐ]	gh  [ɣ]
	voiceless		th  [θ]	s  [s]	ł  [ɬ]	sh  [ʃ]	sr  [ʂ]	kh  [x]	h  [h]
Nasal	voiced	m  [m]		n  [n]
	voiceless			nh  [n̥]
	voiced stop	mb  [ᵐb]		nd  [ⁿd]
	voiced affricate					nj  [ⁿd͡ʒ]
Approximant	voiced	w  [w]			l  [l]	y  [j]	r  [ɻ]
	voiceless	wh  [ʍ]				yh  [ȷ̊]	rh  [ɻ̥]

Vowels

• short
  • a [a]
  • ä [ɑ]
  • e [e]
  • ë [ə]
  • i [i]
  • o [o]
  • u [u]
• long
  • aa [aː]
  • ää [ɑː]
  • ee [eː]
  • ëë [əː]
  • ii [iː]
  • oo [oː]
  • uu [uː]
• diphthongs
  • aw [au]
  • ay [ai]
  • äw [ɑu]
  • ew [eu]
  • ey [ei]
  • iw [iu]
  • oy [oi]
• nasal vowels are marked by an ogonek
  Ogonek
  The ogonek is a diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several European and Native American languages.-Use:...
  
   accent, e.g., ą
• low tone is marked with a grave accent
  Grave accent
  The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
  
  , e.g., à
• rising tone is marked with a circumflex
  Circumflex
  The circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...
  
   accent, e.g., â
• falling tone is marked with a caron
  Caron
  A caron or háček , also known as a wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.It looks...
  
  (or háček), e.g., ǎ
• high tone is never marked, e.g., a

External links

• Hän alphabet
• Han (ANLC)
• Ethnologue: Han