Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and culture.

After the Alaska Purchase, English-speaking missionaries from the United States developed a written version of the language with the Latin alphabet.

The language appears to have spread northward from the Ketchikan–Saxman area towards the Chilkat region since certain conservative features are reduced gradually from south to north.

The shared features between the Eyak language, found around the Copper River delta, and Tongass Tlingit, near the Portland Canal, are all the more striking for the distances that separate them, both geographic and linguistic.

Tlingit is currently classified as a distinct and separate branch of Na-Dene, an indigenous language family of North America.

Edward Sapir (1915) argued for its inclusion in the Na-Dené family, a claim that was subsequently debated by Franz Boas (1917), P.E.

Tongass Tlingit, however, has no tone but a four-way register contrast between short, long, glottalized, and "fading" vowels.

The fading and glottalized vowels in Tongass Tlingit have also been compared with similar systems in the Coast Tsimshian dialect.

Tlingit has a complex phonological system compared to Indo-European languages such as English or Spanish.

The language is also notable for having several laterals but no voiced [l] and for having no labials in most dialects, except for [m] and [p] in recent English loanwords.

Nasal consonants assimilating with /n/ and the velar and uvular plosives is common among Tlingit-speakers of all dialects.

It is uncertain whether this assimilation is autochthonous or if it arose from contact with English, but the former is more likely from a purely articulatory perspective.

Maddieson, Smith, and Bessel (2001) note that all word final non-ejective stops are phonemically unaspirated.

Also, ejective fricatives appear to include tightening of the pharyngeal muscles, which reduces the diameter of the air column and so further increases pressure.

∅-3.NEU.OBJ-ÿu-PERF-ÿa-(0, -D, +I)-t'áahot∅- ÿu- ÿa- t'áa3.NEU.OBJ- PERF- {(0, -D, +I)}- hot"it is hot" Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) (help);Until the late 1960s, Tlingit was written exclusively in phonetic transcription in the works of linguists and anthropologists except for a little-known Cyrillic alphabet used for publications by the Russian Orthodox Church.

A number of amateur anthropologists doing extensive work on the Tlingit had no training in linguistics and so left numerous samples in vague and inconsistent transcriptions, the most famous being George T. Emmons.

However, such noted anthropologists as Franz Boas, John R. Swanton, and Frederica de Laguna have transcribed Tlingit in various related systems that feature accuracy and consistency but sacrifice readability.

The other is that most transcriptions made before Boas's study of Tlingit have numerous mistakes in them, particularly because of misinterpretations of the short vowels and ejective consonants.

There are predictable processes by which the basic phonetic shapes of individual morphemes are modified to fit various phonological requirements.

Analyzing all the possible combinations of morphemes and phonological contexts in Tlingit and constructing a regular language to describe them is a daunting but tractable task.

Tlingit word order is SOV when non-pronominal agent and object phrases both exist in the sentence.

There are also the independent pronominals which are completely separate from the verb and can be used in dependent clauses or in subject or object position.

[citation needed] When analyzing a sentence, the pronominal type is given first, then the form (subject, object, independent) is given following a period.

Strictly speaking, the Tlingit directionals can be classified as nouns on the basis of their syntactic function.

However, they form a distinct semantic set of nouns which indicate direction relative to some stated position.

Focus particles are stylistically written as separate words, but phonetically, they may be indivisible from the preceding utterance.

The combination of the focus á with the demonstratives gives the frequently used particles áyá and áwé, and the less common áhé and áyú.

Combination of the interrogative ágé with the demonstratives gives the confirmative particles ákwé and ákyá (ák-hé and ákyú are uncommon), used to elicit a yes/no response from the listener.

The Irish TV series An Klondike (2015–17), set in Canada in the 1890s, contains Tlingit dialogue.

As a collaborative effort between Tlingit & Haida, the Goldbelt Heritage Foundation, Cedar Group, and illustrators Kelsey Mata and Nick Alan Foote, the project is funded under a three-year grant through the United States Department of Education's Alaska Native Education Program.