Haida and Na-Dene: A New Look at the Evidence

I propose to summarize a number of findings from recent fieldwork and analysis which suggest that the evidence offered in support of the "classical" Na-Dene hypothesis (i.e., as set up by Sapir in his 1915 statement) is spurious, and that there is currently no empirical basis for including Haida in the Na-Dene grouping.' Writers on the Na-Dene hypothesis have in the past relied heavily on the significance of supposedly shared grammatical features; hence much of the debate, so far as Haida is concerned, hinges on the accuracy of Swanton's 1911 grammar for the Handbook of American Indian Languages.2 This is unfortunate, because much of Swanton's analysis contains major flaws, for example, inaccurate segmentation of individual morphemes and confusion of homophonous suffixes. The principal short