Chipewyan

Chipewyan (autonymously Dëne Sųłıné, "people of the willow flats") is a Northern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dene family, spoken by around 12,000 people across northern Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, northern Alberta, and northern Manitoba in Canada. The Chipewyan are the easternmost of the major Northern Athabaskan peoples, having traditionally inhabited the boreal forest-tundra transition zone of subarctic Canada. Linguistically, Chipewyan is famous for its complex tone system, ejective consonants, and the elaborate verbal morphology characteristic of all Athabaskan languages — a single Chipewyan verb can encode information about subject, object, mode, aspect, voice, classifier, theme, and direction in a single word. The Athabaskan family stretches from Chipewyan in the boreal Canadian Subarctic to Navajo (nv) and the Apachean languages of the US Southwest, suggesting Athabaskan migration from the north to the south of North America during the past 1,000-2,000 years.