DRAFT - WORK IN PROGRESS
dAXunhyuuga‘ is the traditional language of the Gulf Coast of Alaska, spanning the region from present-day Cordova to Yakutat, a distance of some four hundred kilometers. The ecological niche occupied by dAXunhyuuga‘ includes the massive Copper River Delta; the world’s largest piedmont glacier; and some of the highest peaks in North America.
dAXunhyuuga‘ is also known as Eyak, a reference to the village of iiyaaG, located where Eyak Lake empties into the Eyak River.
dAXunhyuuga‘ is a linguistic "aunt" to the Dene languages, no closer in structure and vocabulary to neighboring Ahtna than it is to distant Navajo.
This dictionary draws on numerous sources, especially the 1970 manuscript dictionary compiled by Michael Krauss (Alaska Native Language Archive EY961K1970b) and a wealth of language learning materials produced by the Eyak Language Project and Guillaume Leduey over the past decade.
The writing system used in this dictionary makes use of capitalization to distinguish sounds. The four uppercase letters A G L X represents sounds that are different than their lowercase counterparts a g l x. For this reason, capitalization is not used to indicate the beginning of sentences or proper names.