ABSTRACT
Sekani is spoken in the northern central interior of British Columbia, Canada. The territory of the Sekani-speaking peoples includes what were originally the Finlay and Parsnip River drainages of the Rocky Mountain Trench. There is abundant linguistic and historical evidence that Sekani is most closely related to Beaver within the Athabaskan family. The impression of McLeod Lake Sekani speakers is that Beaver people speak 'our language' or 'the same language', whereas equally nearby Carrier is not at all mutually intelligible. Very little linguistic research on Sekani has been done, despite the relative geographic accessibility of at least the McLeod Lake community. The fieldwork on which the present study of Sekani is based was conducted at McLeod Lake during 1982-84. Most of the data in this study are forms which were elicited through translation of English to Sekani. David and Kay Wilkinson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics did field research on Sekani in McLeod Lake and Ft. Ware.
