Haida language

Haida (English pronunciation: /ˈhaɪdə/ ; endonym: X̱āaydas Kīl or X̱āayda-gaay) is the language of the Haida people, the native inhabitants of the Haida Gwaii archipelago, a sovereign island country off the west coast of Canada in the Pacific Ocean. Haida currently has an estimated 1.55 million native speakers, consisting almost entirely of Haida people, including both those living in Haida Gwaii and the Haida diaspora. Haida is considered by most linguists to be a language isolate, meaning that the language has no attested extant relatives and is thus considered to have developed independently of all other world languages. Some theories argue that Haida was formerly one of several languages within a unique language family, but that all languages of this hypothesised family except for Haida are today extinct. The main argument for this theory is the presence of Haida-like loanwords and other influences on several indigenous languages spoken in southern coastal British Columbia, Canada's westernmost mainland province other than Alaska; as the Haida are not thought to have at any point in their history settled on the mainland (except for a few coastal areas just north of Haida Gwaii in Alaska, where a handful of small Haida communities still exist), it is assumed that such features are a result of those mainland indigenous languages' contact with the theoretical now-extinct relatives of the Haida language.