The Tlingit language has been recorded in a number of orthographies over the two hundred years since European contact.[1] The first transcriptions of Tlingit were done by Russian Orthodox ministers in the Cyrillic script.[2] A hiatus in writing Tlingit occurred subsequent to the purchase of Alaska by the United States due to the policies implemented by Presbyterian reverend and territorial educational commissioner Sheldon Jackson, who believed that the use of indigenous languages should be suppressed in favor of English. American and German anthropologists began recording Tlingit in various linguistic transcriptions from the 1890s onward, and there exists a small body of literature and a large amount of vocabulary recorded in these transcriptions. With the work of two linguists from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Gillian Story and Constance Naish, the first “complete” orthography for Tlingit began to spread in the 1960s.[3] This orthography, now somewhat modified, is the most common orthography in use today. In the 1980s Jeff Leer and the Yukon Native Language Center developed another orthography for writing Interior Tlingit. Since the spread of email among the Tlingit population a new orthography has developed by consensus, based on the Naish-Story orthography but adapted to the restrictions of plain text encodings such as ISO 8859-1.
- ^ "Tlingit Conversation Documentation Project". University of Alaska Southeast. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
- ^ Kan, Sergei (2014-07-01). Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. University of Washington Press. p. 323. ISBN 978-0-295-80534-4.
- ^ The Gale Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. Gale. 1998. p. 514. ISBN 978-0-7876-1085-2.