Shasta language


Shasta is an extinct Shastan language formerly spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. It was spoken in a number of dialects, possibly including Okwanuchu. The last fluent speaker, Clara Wicks, died in 1978, and by 1980, only two first language speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today, all ethnic Shasta people speak English as their first language.

Dialects

According to Golla, there were four distinct dialects of Shasta:
  • Ikirakácˑu
  • Iruhikwáˑcˑu
  • Uwáˑtuhúcˑu
  • Ahútˑireˀeˑcˑu

    Phonology

Consonants

The length of a consonant distinguishes meaning in Shasta words. All stops, fricatives and nasals can occur as long or short in Shasta, but approximants only occur as short consonants. Minimal pairs and near minimal pairs are shown below:
  • a gnat vs. a board
  • nothing vs. wild sunflower
  • a person vs. ''cold''

    Vowels

Shasta has four vowels,, with contrastive length, and two tones: high and low.

Tones

Shasta vowels can have low or high tones. High tones are marked by an acute accent in the orthography devised by Silver, whereas low tones are left unmarked. Examples for the vowel are given below:
IPAOrthography
/ú/ú
/úː/úˑ
/ù/u
/ùː/uˑ

Orthography

Silver devised a spelling system for distinguishing consonants and vowels in Shasta. Long phonemes are represented with the symbol following the character ; ejectives are indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme is represented by, and the glottal stop is represented by the superscript IPA symbol. The letters are not used to represent Shasta sounds.