Every language or language family has its sets of problems that anyone working on that language/family must have their say about. One of these problems for the Athapaskan family involves the so-called classifier system, a poorly named system of the first type of voice/valency-affecting derivation outlined in Dixon and Aikenvald (1997) – there is overt marking of suppression and addition of arguments. In this chapter, I focus on the commonalities and differences in use of this system across the Athapaskan family.

Background

I begin with some background on the languages and language family. Athapaskan languages are geographically widespread in western North America, falling into three major discontinuous geographic regions. The northern group is spoken in parts of Alaska and in the Canadian provinces and territories of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Three of the languages that I examine here come from the northern group: Ahtna and Koyukon, which are spoken in Alaska, and Slave [slevi], which is spoken in the Northwest Territories, one community in the Yukon, a small area of northern British Columbia, and northern Alberta. The Pacific Coast languages are/were spoken in northern California and Oregon. I draw data from Hupa here. Hupa is the most divergent of the Athapaskan languages covered in this survey. Finally, the Apachean group is found in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado in the southwestern United States. I use Navajo as an exemplar of this group. I occasionally bring in other languages as well to illustrate particular points.