Salishan languages
The Salishan languages, also known as the Salish languages, are a family of languages found in the Pacific Northwest in North America, namely the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. They are characterised by agglutinativity and syllabic consonants. For instance the Nuxalk word , meaning 'he had had a bunchberry plant', has twelve obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels.
The Salishan languages are a geographically contiguous block, with the exception of the Nuxalk, in the Central Coast of British Columbia, and the extinct Tillamook language, to the south on the central coast of Oregon.
The terms Salish and Salishan are used interchangeably by linguists and anthropologists. The name Salish or Selisch is the endonym of the Flathead Nation. Linguists later applied the name Salish to related languages in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the peoples do not have self-designations in their languages; they frequently have specific names for local dialects, as the local group was more important culturally than larger tribal relations.
All Salishan languages are considered critically endangered, some extremely so with only three or four speakers left. Those languages considered extinct are often referred to as "dormant languages", in that no speakers exist currently, but still serve as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group. In the early 21st century, few Salish languages have more than 2,000 speakers. Fluent daily speakers of almost all Salishan languages are generally over sixty years of age; many languages have only speakers over eighty.
Salishan languages are most commonly written using the Americanist phonetic notation to account for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in most modern alphabets. Many groups have evolved their own distinctive uses of the Latin alphabet, however, such as the Saanich.
Family division
The Salishan language family consists of twenty-three languages. The family is typically organized into five main divisions with variation: Central Salish, Tsamosan, Interior Salish, Tillamook, and Nuxalk. Nuxalk is sometimes classified as part of the Coastal Division of languages. Tillamook is also sometimes classified as part of the Coast Division. It was proposed by Morris Swadesh that the Olympic branch of Coast Salishan languages is a natural subdivision within the family, although linguists today generally accept the Olympic branch as a subgrouping within the Coast Salish division. The Interior Salish languages have a higher degree of closeness to each other than the more distant Coast Salish languages.Language tree
Below is a list of Salishan languages, dialects, and subdialects. The genetic unity among the Salish languages is evident. Neighboring groups have communicated often, to the point that it is difficult to untangle the influence each dialect and language has upon others. This list is a linguistic classification that may not correspond to political divisions. In contrast to classifications made by linguistic scholars, many Salishan groups consider their particular variety of speech to be a separate language rather than a dialect.Languages or dialects with no living native speakers are marked with at the highest level.
Reduced overview
Detailed overview
Genetic relations
No relationship to any other language family is well established.Edward Sapir suggested that the Salishan languages might be related to the Wakashan and Chimakuan languages in a hypothetical Mosan family. This proposal persists primarily through Sapir's stature: with little evidence for such a family, no progress has been made in reconstructing it.
The Salishan languages, principally Chehalis, contributed greatly to the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon.
Family features
- Post-velar harmony
- Presence of syllables without vowels
- Grammatical reduplication
- Nonconcatenation
- Tenselessness
- Nounlessness
Syntax
Word order
Although there is a wide array of Salish languages, they all share some basic traits. All are verb initial languages, with VSO being the most common word order. Some Salishan languages allow for VOS and SVO as well. There is no case marking, but central noun phrases will often be preceded by determiners while non-central NPs will take prepositions. Some Salishan languages are ergative, or split-ergative, and many take unique object agreement forms in passive statements. In the St'át'imcets language, for example, absolutive relative clauses omit person markers, while ergative relative clauses keep person makers on the subject, and sometimes use the topic morpheme -tali. Thus, St'át'imcets is split-ergative, as it is not ergative all the time. Subject and object pronouns usually take the form of affixes that attach to the verb. All Salish languages are head-marking. Possession is marked on the possessed noun phrase as either a prefix or a suffix, while person is marked on predicates. In Central Salish languages like Tillamook and Shuswap, only one plain NP is permitted aside from the subject.Valency-marking
Salishan languages are known for their polysynthetic nature. A verb stem will often have at least one affix, which is typically a suffix. These suffixes perform a variety of functions, such as transitive, causative, reciprocal, reflexive, and applicative. Applicative affixes seem to be present on the verb when the direct object is central to the event being discussed, but is not the theme of the sentence. The direct object may be a recipient, for example. It may also refer to a related noun phrase, like the goal a verb intends to achieve, or the instrument used in carrying out the action of the verb. In the sentence ‘The man used the axe to chop the log with’, the axe is the instrument and is indicated in Salish through an applicative affix on the verb.Applicative affixes increase the number of affixes a verb can take on, that is, its syntactic valence. They are also known as "transitivizers" because they can change a verb from intransitive to transitive. For example, in the sentence 'I got scared.', 'scared' is intransitive. However, with the addition of an applicative affix, which is syntactically transitive, the verb in Salish becomes transitive and the sentence can come to mean ‘I got scared of you.’. In some Salishan languages, such as Sḵwx̲wú7mesh, the transitive forms of verbs are morphologically distinctive and marked with a suffix, while the intransitive forms are not. In others such as Halkomelem, intransitive forms have a suffix as well. In some Salish languages, transitivizers can be either controlled or limited-control.
These transitivizers can be followed by object suffixes, which come to modern Salishan languages via Proto-Salish. Proto-Salish had two types of object suffixes, neutral and causative, that were then divided into first, second, and third persons, and either singular or plural. Tentative reconstructions of these suffixes include the neutral singular *-c, *-ci, and *-∅, the causative singular *-mx, *-mi, and *-∅, the neutral plural *-al or *-muɬ, *-ulm or *-muɬ, and the causative plural *-muɬ. In Salishan languages spoken since Proto-Salish, the forms of those suffixes have been subject to vowel shifts, borrowing pronoun forms from other languages, and merging of neutral and causative forms.
Three patterns of negation
There are three general patterns of negation among the Salishan languages. The most common pattern involves a negative predicate in the form of an impersonal and intransitive stative verb, which occurs in sentence initial position. The second pattern involves a sentence initial negative particle that is often attached to the sentence's subject, and the last pattern simply involves a sentence initial negative particle without any change in inflectional morphology or a determiner/complementizer. In addition, there is a fourth restricted pattern that has been noted only in Squamish.Nounlessness
Salishan languages exhibit predicate/argument flexibility. All content words are able to occur as the head of the predicate or in an argument. Words with noun-like meanings are automatically equivalent to when used predicatively, such as Lushootseed sbiaw which means ' coyote'. Words with more verb-like meanings, when used as arguments, are equivalent to or . For example, Lushootseed ʔux̌ʷ means ' goes'.The following examples are from Lushootseed.
An almost identical pair of sentences from St’át’imcets demonstrates that this phenomenon is not restricted to Lushootseed.
This and similar behaviour in other Salish and Wakashan languages has been used as evidence for a complete lack of a lexical distinction between nouns and verbs in these families. This has become controversial in recent years. David Beck of the University of Alberta contends that there is evidence for distinct lexical categories of 'noun' and 'verb' by arguing that, although any distinction is neutralised in predicative positions, words that can be categorised as 'verbs' are marked when used in syntactic argument positions. He argues that Salishan languages are omnipredicative, but only have 'uni-directional flexibility', which makes Salishan languages no different from other omnipredicative languages such as Arabic and Nahuatl, which have a clear lexical noun-verb distinction.
Beck does concede, however, that the Lushootseed argument ti ʔux̌ʷ does represent an example of an unmarked 'verb' used as an argument and that further research may potentially substantiate Dale Kinkade's 1983 position that all Salishan content words are essentially 'verbs' and that the use of any content word as an argument involves an underlying relative clause. For example, with the determiner ti translated as 'that which', the arguments ti ʔux̌ʷ and ti sbiaw would be most literally translated as 'that which goes' and 'that which is a coyote' respectively.