Lillooet language

Lillooet, also Lil’wat, is a Salishan language of the Interior branch spoken by the Stʼatʼimc in southern British Columbia, Canada, around the middle Fraser and Lillooet Rivers. The language of the Lower Lillooet people uses the name Ucwalmícwts, because St̓át̓imcets means "the language of the people of Sat̓", i.e. the Upper Lillooet of the Fraser River.
Lillooet is a critically endangered language with around 120 fluent speakers and 393 semi-speakers. In 2022, there was a reported 1092 people learning the language.

Regional varieties

Lillooet has two main dialects:

Upper/Northern Lillooet
Lower/Southern Lillooet

Upper Lillooet is spoken around Fountain, Pavilion, Lillooet, and neighboring areas. Lower Lillooet is spoken around Mount Currie and neighboring areas. An additional subdialect called "Skookumchuck" is spoken within the Lower Lilooet dialect area, but there is no information available in van Eijk. A common self-designation used by the bands of the Lower Lillooet River below Lillooet Lake is Ucwalmicwts.
The Clao7alcw language nest program at Mount Currie, home of the Lil’wat, is conducted in the Lillooet language and was the focus of Onowa McIvor's Master's thesis.
As of 2014, "the Coastal Corridor Consortium—an entity made up of board members from First Nations and educational partners to improve aboriginal access to and performance in postsecondary education and training—... developed a Lil’wat-language program."

Phonology

Consonants

Like other languages of the American Northwest language area, including all Salishan languages, Lillooet has a large consonant inventory with extensive phonemic glottalization. Lillooet has 44 consonants distinguished at six places of articulation. Every non-fricative consonant can be glottalized; only the glottalized lateral affricate lacks a plain counterpart, although the glottalized counterpart of has a sibilant release, and the uvular glottalized consonants are affricated. Lillooet's consonant inventory is unusual in lacking a hissing sibilant fricative, hence is used to represent in the practical orthography.

Glottalized stops are pronounced as ejective consonants. Glottalized sonorants are pronounced with creaky voice. = = are all essentially equivalent notation which are often used interchangeably in descriptions of Lillooet.
The glottalized consonants of Lillooet contrast not only with plain consonants, but also with sequences of consonants and glottal stops. For example, "the beaver, the money" contrasts with "the onion".
The dental approximants are pronounced alternatively as interdental fricatives or as dental fricatives, depending on the dialect.
There are four pairs of retracted and nonretracted consonants. Retraction on consonants is essentially velarization, although additionally, nonretracted is phonetically laminal whereas retracted is apical.
*
*
*
*
Among the post-velar consonants, the obstruents are all post-velar whereas the approximants are either pharyngeal or true uvulars.

Vowels

Lillooet has 8 vowels:

The phonetic realization of the phonemes are indicated in brackets to the right, though many allophones exist; for example, the realization of ranges from, that of from, and that non-retracted vowel from. Vowels in stressed syllables tend to have less central pronunciations compared to their unstressed counterparts. For example, guy̓guy̓túlh 'always sleeping' is underlyingly but is realized as, with the stressed /o/ being decentralized.
All retracted vowels are indicated by a line under the vowel. These retracted vowels alternate morphophonemically.
Since retracted and non-retracted can both be pronounced, there is often phonetic overlap.

Phonological processes

Some sequences give rise to an epenthetic.

Post-velar Harmony :

Within roots, all consonant and vowel retracted-nonretracted pairs must be of the same type. That is, a root may not contain both a retracted and a nonretracted vowel or consonant. This is a type of retracted tongue root harmony involving both vowels and consonants, an areal feature of this region of North America shared by other Interior Salishan and non-Salishan languages.
In addition to the root harmony restriction, some suffixes harmonize with the root to which they are attached. For instance, the inchoative suffix -wil’c:

Orthography

There are two practical orthographies, one developed by Randall Bouchard and another developed by Jan van Eijk. Several works also use transcriptions based on Americanist Phonetic Notation. The Bouchard practical orthography was used by the Upper St̓át̓imc communities and the Upper St̓át̓imc Language, Culture and Education Society but they have since also adopted the van Eijk practical orthography that has been used by the Mount Currie School and the Lillooet Council. The van Eijk practical orthography is unusual in that is written, but it is preferred in many modern Lillooet-speaking communities.

Grammar

Lillooet has two main types of words:

full words
# variable words
# invariable words
clitics
# proclitics
# enclitics

The variable word type may be affected by many morphological processes, such as prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and glottalization.
Lillooet, like the other Salishan languages, exhibits predicate/argument flexibility. All full words are able to occur in the predicate and any full word is able to appear in an argument, even those that seem verb-like, such as t̓ak 'go along', which as an independent argument is equivalent to 'one that goes along'.

Reduplication

Lillooet, as is typical of the Salishan family, has several types of reduplication that have a range of functions such as expressing plural, diminutive, aspect, etc.
A more complicated type of reduplication is the internal reduplication used to express the diminutive. In this case the consonant before a stressed vowel is reduplicated after the stressed vowel and usually the vowel then changes to e. Examples are below:
More than one reduplicative process can occur in a given word:
Lillooet has several other variants of the above types. Reduplication is further complicated by consonant glottalization.

Mood and modality

The subjunctive mood appears in nine distinct environments, with a range of semantic effects, including:

weakening an imperative to a polite request,
turning a question into an uncertainty statement,
creating an ignorance free relative.

Unlike Indo-European equivalents, the Lillooet subjunctive is not selected by attitude verbs.
Lillooet has a complex system of subject and object agreement. There are different subject agreement paradigms for transitive vs. intransitive predicates. For intransitive predicates, there are three distinct subject paradigms, one of which is glossed as 'subjunctive' by van Eijk and Davis

Sample text

The following is a portion of a story in van Eijk told by Rosie Joseph of Mount Currie.
Lillooet:
Nilh aylh lts7a sMáma ti húz̓a qweqwl̓el̓tmínan. N̓as ku7 ámlec áku7 tsípunsa. Nilh t̓u7 st̓áksas ti xláka7sa. Tsicw áku7, nilh t̓u7 ses wa7, kwánas et7ú i sqáwtsa. Wa7 ku7 t̓u7 áti7 xílem, t̓ak ku7 knáti7 ti pú7y̓acwa. Nilh ku7 t̓u7 skwánas, lip̓in̓ás ku7. Nilh ku7 t̓u7 aylh stsuts: "Wa7 nalh aylh láti7 kapv́ta!" Nilh ku7 t̓u7 aylh sklhaka7mínas ku7 láti7 ti sqáwtsa cwilhá k̓a, nao7q̓ spawts ti kwanensása...
International Phonetic Alphabet:
English translation:
This time it is Máma I am going to talk about. She went that way to get some food from her roothouse. So she took along her bucket. She got there, and she stayed around, taking potatoes. She was doing that, and then a mouse ran by there. So she grabbed it, she squeezed it. So she said: "You get all squashed now!" So she opened her hand and she let go of what turned out to be a potato, it was a rotten potato that she had caught...