Denaʼina /dɪˈnaɪnə/, also Tanaina, is the Athabaskan language of the region surrounding Cook Inlet.

James Kari has done extensive work on the language since 1972, including his edition with Alan Boraas of the collected writings of Peter Kalifornsky in 1991.

The word Denaʼina is composed of the dena, meaning 'person' and the human plural suffix ina.

[3] Denaʼina is a polysynthetic language where a single word can mean the entirety of an English sentence.

Inanimate plurals are unable to be indicated by a noun suffix, and instead attach to the verb.

Depending on the gender affix that follows the classificatory affix, the nature of the object can change, as indicated by the following chart: hair, fur, caribou mat However, there are other categories of classification or instrumentation that indicate how an action was done or aspects about the outcome of the action.

Denaʼina shows space relations through the addition of morphemes that are either independent or bound, known as postpositions.

For example, yunit means "at a place far upstream", and is composed of the prefix "yu", root "ni", and suffix "t".

Temporal adverbs convey information about when an action or intent of the verb occurred.

Aspect conveys information about how the action happened, and works in conjunction with tense.

In object-verb (OV), the subject is a pronoun contained in the verb, and the object is a noun.

In Denaʼina, all verbs require a nominative (subject) and an accusative (object), which indicates a nominative-accusative case.

Both core and oblique arguments attach to the verb via prefixes which must occur in a certain order.

Inherently possessed words consist of a prefix and a stem which are abound morphemes.

Contributing factors to the endangerment include the policy of early territorial schools to not let native students speak their own language, especially in regards to the Kenai dialect.

This policy was often enforced via corporal punishment; the trauma caused elders, all within one generation, to avoid speaking the language.