The Kaska language originated from the family of Athabaskan languages. Traditionally Kaska is an oral aboriginal language that is used by the Kaska Dena people. The Kaska Dene region consists of a small area in the Southwestern part of the Northwest Territories, the Southeastern part of Yukon Territory, and the Northern part of British Columbia. The communities that are in the Kaska Dene region are Fort Ware in N.W.T.; Ross River and Watson Lake in Y.T.; Dease Lake, Good Hope Lake, Lower Post, Fireside, and Muncho Lake in B.C. Kaska is made up of eight dialects, all of which have similar pronunciations and expressional terms. The town of Watson Lake was established around the period of the second World War when the Alaska Highway was first built in 1942. A major consequence of colonization was Kaska language loss. Another major cause of Kaska language loss in Canada was due to the Canadian Residential School System. The effect that these schools had on the Kaska language have caused a language gap between two generations resulting in few young speakers. Phonology Consonants Vowels Kaska makes use of the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, which, through various combinations of inflection (high, falling, and rising tone), lengthening and nasalization, produce about 60 vowel sounds in total. Allophones of sounds can also be heard as . Morphology Kaska is a polysynthetic language, commonly featuring sentence words. It is head-final, availing nine prefix positions to a given stem verb morpheme. Kaska does not mark for control or grammatical gender. (Sexual gender is often implied in narratives through contextual association with the prevalent gender roles of Kaska society, particularly with regard to warfare.) The Verb-Sentence Verb-sentences, or single-word sentences consisting of a stem verb modified by inflectional, derivational and/or other types of affixes, commonly appear in Kaska. In these cases, a word-final verb morpheme may be accompanied by up to nine prefixes grouped into three categories: the disjunct, the conjunct and the verb theme. O'Donnell's Kaska verb structure diagram is shown below. Verb Theme The verb theme carries the stem verb morpheme, which is immediately preceded by one of four classifiers (-h-, -Ø-, -l-, -d-). The -Ø- classifier primarily marks intransitive and stative verbs. The classifier -h-, referred to as ł classification in Athabaskan literature, marks transitivity and/or causativity and deletes when preceded by the first-person singular subject marking s-. Though it is found in