Notes on a Chipewyan Dialect

1. In the summer of 1967, while teaching at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, I had the opportunity of visiting Camsell Hospital, where Indians from various parts of western Canada are brought for treatment. It was my hope that a speaker of one of the lesser known northern Athapaskan languages might be in residence. As it turned out, of the two who were considered well enough to be interviewed on the day of my first visit, one was a speaker of Chipewyan, the other of Beaver. In order to acquaint them with what I wanted, I took down a dozen or so words from each of them, starting with the numerals. In looking over my notes I observed that I had recorded the Chipewyan word for three with an initial /k/ instead of the expected /t/.1 Although it seemed likely that this was a simple error, I remembered that Kiowa-Apache and other