Saanich dialect
Saanich is the variety of North [Straits Salish language|North Straits Salish] spoken by the Saanich people in the Pacific Northwest of North America. North Straits Salish is a dialect continuum, the varieties of which are closely related to the Klallam language.
Language revitalization efforts
"The Saanich people School Board, together with the FirstVoices program for revitalizing Aboriginal languages, is working to teach a new generation to speak SENĆOŦEN" at the ȽÁU¸WELṈEW̱ Tribal School. The first Grade 12 class is scheduled to graduate in June 2026.SENĆOŦEN texting, mobile app and portal
A Saanich texting app was released in 2012. A SENĆOŦEN iPhone app was released in October 2011. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at the First Voices SENĆOŦEN Community Portal.Phonology
Vowels
Saanich has no rounded vowels in native vocabulary. As in many languages, vowels are strongly affected by uvular consonants.| Type | Front | Central | Back |
| High | |||
| Mid | |||
| Low |
Consonants
The following table includes all the sounds found in the North Straits dialects. No one dialect includes them all. Plosives are not aspirated, but are not voiced either. Ejectives have weak glottalization.According to Montler, the dorsals, as well as their labialized and ejective counterparts, are realized more fronted as post-velars ; the velars likewise are articulated as pre-velar. However, later sources do not maintain this distinction, and simply use velar and uvular.
Stress
Saanich stress is phonemic. Each full word has one stressed syllable, either in the root or in a suffix, the position of which is lexically determined. "Secondary stress" is sometimes described, but this is merely a way of distinguishing lexical schwas from epenthetic schwas.Writing system
The Saanich orthography was created by Dave Elliott in 1978, by using a typewriter to combine Latin characters with other marks to create new characters. It is a unicase alphabet, using only uppercase letters with the single exception of a lower-case s for the third person possessive suffix.The glottal stop is not always indicated, but may be written with a spacing cedilla: or less formally with a comma:. When they are distinguished, the glottalized resonants are written,,,,,, or likewise with a comma. The comma was the original orthography, but caused problems with text searches and the like; Saanich dictionaries, spell-check and increasingly common usage have switched to the cedilla, and in 2025 Unicode defined the spacing cedilla as a letter to prevent word breaks, another problem with the comma.
The vowel is usually written, unless it occurs next to a uvular consonant, in which case it is written.
often surfaces as when stressed, and this may be reflected in the orthography. For instance, is spelled Á¸Á¸LȻEṈ rather than phonemic *Á¸ÁL¸ȻEṈ in the Saanich dictionary, and is O¸NXSET rather than *ON¸XSET.
Example text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:| Saanich: | ' |
| IPA: | |
| English original:''' | "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." |
Unicode
In 2004, four letters from the Saanich alphabet were added to the Unicode standard, and the barred K was accepted in 2024.In 2025, the properties of the spacing cedilla were changed to accommodate Saanich.