or Athapaskan languages
Family of North American Indian languages.
There are perhaps 200,000 speakers of Athabaskan. Northern Athabaskan includes more than 20 languages scattered across an immense region of subarctic North America from western Alaska to Hudson Bay and south to southern Alberta and British Columbia. Pacific Coast Athabaskan consisted of four to eight languages, all now extinct or nearing extinction. Apachean consists of eight closely related languages spoken in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, including Navajo and the various subdivisions of Apache. In 1990 Navajo had some 150,000 speakers, far more than any other indigenous language of the U.S. or Canada. In 1915 Edward Sapir placed the Athabaskan family together with Tlingit and Haida (languages of Alaska and British Columbia, respectively) in a larger grouping called Na-Dene; this hypothetical relationship continues to be controversial.