Dena’ina Alphabet

The Dena’ina alphabet consists of a subset of letters and letter combinations (“blends”) from the English alphabet, together with one special character, known as the “barred-l”. This is an “L” with a slash through it. Where the barred-l symbol is not available, the backslash \ is sometimes used instead.

Some blended consonants do not occur in the English alphabet. In particular, the apostrophe is often used in combination with another letter (and may occur by itself as a letter). Two “hatted” symbols ŷ and ĥ are used; these may be subsituted with y and hh, repectively. There is no vowel o. The letters f and r are used only in borrowed Russian words. This gives a total of 41 Dena’ina letters or letter combinations.

’ a b ch ch’ d dl dz e f g gg gh h ĥ i j k k’ l ł m n q q’ r s sh t t’ tl tl’ ts ts’ u v w x y ŷ z zh

Although some of the letters and letter combinations in the Dena’ina alphabet are identical to those in the English alphabet, they are not necessarily pronounced in the same way. For example, the Dena’ina letter ch is pronounced very similarly to that in English ‘cheese’, but the Dena’ina letter h is a very different sound than the English one.

Below are some words that illustrate the sounds in the Dena’ina Alphabet. They are spoken by Helen Dick of Lime Village.

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These recordings were made in Feb 2005 for the Inland Dena’ina Key Words, edited by James Kari. The original publication, including an audio CD, is available from Dena’inaq’ Titaztunt.

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