The Salishan languages ( ), also known as the Salish languages ( ), are a family of languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest of North America, including the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. They are characterised by agglutinativity and syllabic consonants. For instance, the Nuxalk word (), meaning 'then she/he had had [in her/his possession] 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 (Bella Coola), 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 Bitterroot Salish. Linguists later applied the name Salish to related languages in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the peoples do not have self-designations (autonyms) 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 (Central division, a.k.a. Coast Salish), Tsamosan (a.k.a. Olympic Salish), Interior Salish (Interior division), 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 + Salishan Nuxalk Nuxalk Central (Coast) Salish Comox Halkomelem Lushootseed Nooksack Pentlatch Sechelt Squamish Straits Salish group Klallam Northern Straits Twana Tsamosan Inland division Cowlitz Upper Chehalis Maritime division Lower Chehalis Quinault Tillamook Tillamook Interior Salish Northern Shuswap Lillooet Thompson River Salish Southern Coeur d’Alene Columbia-Moses Colville-Okanagan Montana Salish
Detailed overview + Nuxalk (also: Bella Coola, Salmon River) Kimsquit Nuxalk Kwatna Tallheo Central Salish (a.k.a. Coast Salish) Comox (Also: ) Island Comox (also: , , ) Mainland Comox (also: , , ) Halkomelem Island (also: , ) Cowichan Snuneymuxw and Snaw-Na-Was Halalt Stz'uminus (Chemainus) Lamalcha Malahat Penelakut Lyackson Lake Cowichan Downriver (also: Hunqʼumʔiʔnumʔ) Musqueam Katzie Kwantlen Snokomish Tsawwassen Kwikwetlem Tsleil-waututh Upriver (also: Upper Sto:lō, Halqʼəméyləm) Sts'Ailes Chilliwack area bands Tait Skway Lushootseed (also: , Puget Salish, Skagit-Nisqually) Northern Skagit (also: ) Sauk-Suiattle (also: ) Snohomish (also: ) Southern Duwamish (also: ) Puyallup (also: ) Nisqually (also: ) Suquamish (also: ) Nooksack (also: , ) Pentlatch (also: ) Sechelt () Squamish (also: , , , ) Straits Salish group (also: Straits) Klallam (also: Clallam, ) Becher Bay Eastern Western Northern Straits (also: Straits) Lummi (also: , ) Saanich (also: , , ) Samish (also: ) Semiahmoo (also: ) T'Sou-ke (also: Sooke, C̓awk) Songhees (also: ) Twana (also: Skokomish, , ) Quilcene Skokomish (also: ) (a.k.a. Olympic Salish) Inland division Cowlitz (also: ) Upper Chehalis (also: ) Oakville Chehalis Satsop Tenino Chehalis Maritime division Lower Chehalis (also: ) Humptulips Westport-Shoalwater Wynoochee Quinault (also: ) Queets Quinault Tillamook (also: ) Siletz Tillamook Garibaldi-Nestucca Nehalem Interior Salish Northern Shuswap (also: , ) Eastern Kinbasket Shuswap Lake Western Canim Lake Chu Chua Deadman's Creek–Kamloops Fraser River Pavilion-Bonaparte Lillooet (also: Lilloet, ) Lillooet-Fountain Mount Currie–Douglas Thompson River Salish (also: , , , Thompson River, Thompson Salish, Thompson, known in frontier times as the Hakamaugh, Klackarpun, Couteau or Knife Indians) Lytton Nicola Valley Spuzzum–Boston Bar Thompson Canyon Southern Coeur d’Alene (also: , ) Columbia-Moses (also: Columbia, ) Chelan Entiat Columbian Wenatchee (also: Pesquous) Colville-Okanagan (also: Okanagan, , , ) Northern Quilchena & Spaxomin Sinixt sn-selxcin Penticton Similkameen Vernon Southern Colville-Inchelium Methow San Poil–Nespelem Southern Okanogan Montana Salish (Kalispel–Pend d'Oreille language, Spokane–Kalispel–Bitterroot Salish–Upper Pend d'Oreille) Bitterroot Salish (also: , Bitterroot, Flathead) Kalispel Chewelah Kalispel (also: Qalispé, Lower Pend d’Oreille, Lower Kalispel) Upper Pend d’Oreille (also: , , , Upper Kalispel) Spokane (also: )
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.Beck (2000).
The Salishan languages, principally Chehalis, contributed greatly to the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon.
Family features
Post-velar harmony (more areal) Presence of syllables without vowels Grammatical reduplication Nonconcatenation (infixes, metathesis, glottalization) Tenselessness Nounlessness (controversial)
Syntax The syntax of Salish languages is notable for its word order (verb-initial), its valency-marking, and the use of several forms of negation.
Word order Although there is a wide array of Salish languages, they all share some basic traits. All are verb initial languages, with VSO (verb-subject-object) 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 (Lillooet Salish) language, for example, absolutive relative clauses (including a head, like "the beans", and a restricting clause, like "that she re-fried", which references the head) 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 (the subject conducted the action on purpose) or limited-control (the subject did not intend to conduct the action, or only managed to conduct a difficult action).
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 (regular transitive) and causative (when a verb causes the object to do something or be in a certain state), 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 (1st person), *-ci (2nd person), and *-∅ (3rd person), the causative singular *-mx (1st), *-mi (2nd), and *-∅ (3rd), the neutral plural *-al or *-muɬ (1st), *-ulm or *-muɬ (2nd), and the causative plural *-muɬ (1st and 2nd). In Salishan languages spoken since Proto-Salish, the forms of those suffixes have been subject to vowel shifts, borrowing pronoun forms from other languages (such as Kutenai), and merging of neutral and causative forms (as in Secwepemc, Nlaka'pamuctsin, Twana, Straits Salishan languages, and Halkomelem).
Three patterns of negation