Haa Lingít Yoo Xh'atángi

Lance Xh'unei A. Twitchell has started an interesting new site for collaborative exploration and discussion of the Tlingit language. It’s rather simply entitled Haa Lingít Yoo Xh'atángi, which translates crudely to “our Tlingit thus speech”, and is the conventional phrase describing the Tlingit language in Tlingit. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but he’s just gone and done it. It’s one of those web BBS things, running on PunBB which is a minimalist reinterpretation of the usual phpBB-style web forum.

I’ve already started spamming up the place with a bunch of mindless blather about Tlingit linguistics. The neat idea Lance has is to bring all the academics and nerds like me together with the teachers and learners who don’t have the fancy linguistic education to be able to read Jeff Leer’s byzantine prose. Hopefully as more people sign up the place will see more commentary from others besides me and Lance, and it will grow into a useful online community helping to support Tlingit language documentation and revitalization. Until then it’s mostly me throwing bits to the webcrawler gods.