Kaska is an endangered Athabaskan language. Traditionally, Kaska was an oral aboriginal language used by the Kaska Dena people. The Kaska Dene region consists of a small area in the Southwestern part of the Northwest Territories, the Southeastern part of Yukon Territory, and the Northern part of British Columbia. Kaska is made up of eight dialects, all of which have similar pronunciations and expressional terms. Kaska Dena children are not learning to be fluent because many families do not use the Kaska language at home.

Phonology

Consonants

{| class="wikitable" style=text-align:center

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! rowspan="2" colspan="2" |

! rowspan="2" | Labial

! rowspan="2" |Dental

! colspan="3" | Alveolar

! rowspan="2" | Post-al.<br/>/Palatal

! rowspan="2" | Velar

! rowspan="2" | Glottal

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! <small>median</small>

! <small>sibilant</small>

! <small>lateral</small>

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! colspan="2" | Nasal

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! rowspan="3" | Stop

! <small>tenuis</small>

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! <small>aspirated</small>

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! <small>ejective</small>

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! rowspan="2" | Fricative

! <small>voiceless</small>

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! <small>voiced</small>

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! colspan="2" |Rhotic

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! colspan="2" | Approximant

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Vowels

Kaska makes use of the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, which, through various combinations of inflection (high, falling, and rising tone), lengthening and nasalization, produce about 60 vowel sounds in total.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center;"

!

!Front

!Central

!Back

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!Close

|, ,

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|, ,

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!Near-close

|()

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|()

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!Close-mid

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| rowspan="2" |()

|, ,

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!Open-mid

|(),

|,

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!Open

|, ()

|,

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Allophones of sounds can also be heard as .

Kaska is a polysynthetic language, commonly featuring sentence words. It is head-final, availing nine prefix positions to a given stem verb morpheme. Kaska does not mark for control or grammatical gender. (Sexual gender is often implied in narratives through contextual association with the prevalent gender roles of Kaska society, particularly with regard to warfare.)

The Verb-Sentence

Verb-sentences, or single-word sentences consisting of a stem verb modified by inflectional, derivational and/or other types of affixes, commonly appear in Kaska. In these cases, a word-final verb morpheme may be accompanied by up to nine prefixes grouped into three categories: the disjunct, the conjunct and the verb theme. O'Donnell's Kaska verb structure diagram is shown below.

{| class="wikitable" border="1"

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! colspan="3" | Disjunct Prefixes

! colspan="4" | Conjunct Prefixes

! colspan="3" | Verb Theme

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| Oblique Object || Postposition || Distributive Plural

| Subject Agreement II || Direct Object || Mood/Aspect || Subject Agreement I

| Thematic Prefix || Classifier || Verb Stem

|}

Verb Theme

The verb theme carries the stem verb morpheme, which is immediately preceded by one of four classifiers (-h-, -Ø-, -l-, -d-).

The -Ø- classifier primarily marks intransitive and stative verbs.

The classifier -h-, referred to as ł classification in Athabaskan literature, marks transitivity and/or causativity and deletes when preceded by the first-person singular subject marking s-. Though it is found in some intransitive clauses, as in sehtsū́ts ("clothlike object is located"), these generally bear the -Ø- classifier.

  • etsén segan 'the meat is dried'
  • etsén sehgan 's/he dried the meat'

The -d- classifier serves a more complex function, accompanying self-benefactives, reflexives, reciprocals, iteratives (marked by the prefix ne-) and passives.

The -l- classifier combines the functions of the -d- and -h- (ł) classifiers.

Conjunct

The conjunct, which appears between the disjunct prefix group and the verb theme, carries inflectional information including subject, direct object and mood/aspect markings. In subject markings, Kaska syntactically differentiates between "subject I" and "subject II" morphemes (the latter represented in the gray boxes in the table below to the left).

{| border="1" class="wikitable floatleft"

|+ Subject Markers in Kaska

!

! Singular

! Plural

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! 1st person

| s- || style="background: silver" | dze-

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! 2nd person

| n-

| ah-

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! 3rd person

| style="background: silver" | Ø-

| style="background: silver" | ge-

|}

{| border="1" class="wikitable floatright"

|+ Direct Object Markers in Kaska

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! Singular

! Plural

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! 1st person

| se- || gu-

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! 2nd person

| ne-

| neh-

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! 3rd person

| Ø-/ye-

| ge-

|}

Subject I markers occur conjunct-finally, while subject II markers occur conjunct-initially.

The direct object markings are given in the table at right. The marking for third-person singular direct object depends on the subject of the sentence: if the subject is in first- or second-person, then it is Ø-, but becomes ye- when the subject is in third-person.

Disjunct

The disjunct typically carries adverbial and derivational prefixes, including the negative marker dū- and the distributive plural morpheme né-, which pluralizes otherwise dual subjects and, in some cases, singular objects. The presence (or absence) of this feature bears most of the numerical marking that is not already indicated contextually or through the subject and object affixes themselves. The prefix ɬe- marks for dual subject in at least one verb phrase: "to sit". Postpositional morphemes, such as ts'i'- ("to") and yé- ("about"), also appear in the disjunct, along with the oblique object markings listed in the table below.

{| border="1" class="wikitable"

|+ Oblique Object Markers in Kaska

!

! Singular

! Plural

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! 1st person

| es- || gu-

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! 2nd person

| ne-

| neh-

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! 3rd person

| me-

| ge-

|}

Space, Time and Aspect

Source: