A Year in Language, Day 225: Denesuline/Chipewyan Denesuline is an indigenous Canadian language of the Athabaskan family, one of the America's largest native families. It is spoken by over 11,000 people (a little under half the ethnic population) in central Canada, and has official status in the Northwest Territories. The terms Chipewyan is the standard English term for the ethnolinguistic group, and comes from the name of the people in an unrelated Algonquian language (Plains Cree). Most speakers of North Athabaskan languages refer to themselves as Dene, which, in typical style, just means "people". It should not be conflated with "Chippewa" which is another term for Ojibwe. Denesuline includes the cross-linguistically uncommon sound known as the "interdental fricative", which English also has and writes "th". Most consonants in the language can be aspirated or ejective. The language briefly adopted the syllabic writing system used by many indigenous languages of Canada, but currently uses Latin script. There is some controversy of the use of the letter "ʔ", used for the glottal stop, in official documents.
