Nuxalk ( ), also known as Bella Coola (), is a Salishan language spoken by the Nuxalk people. Today, it is an endangered language in the vicinity of the Canadian town of Bella Coola, British Columbia. While the language is still sometimes called Bella Coola by linguists, the native name Nuxalk is preferred by the Nuxalk Nation's government.Suttles, Wayne (1990), "Introduction". In "Northwest Coast", ed. Wayne Suttles. Vol. 7 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C. Sturtevant, p.15.
Though the number of truly fluent speakers has not increased, the language is now taught in both the provincial school system and the Nuxalk Nation's own school, , which means 'a place of learning'. Nuxalk language classes, if taken to at least the Grade 11 level, are considered adequate second-language qualifications for entry to the major B.C. universities. CKNN-FM Nuxalk Radio is also working to promote the language.
Name The name Nuxalk for the language comes from the native , referring to the Bella Coola Valley. Bella Coola is a rendering of the Heiltsuk , meaning 'stranger'.
Geographical distribution Nowadays, Nuxalk is spoken only in Bella Coola, British Columbia, surrounded by Wakashan- and Athabascan-speaking tribes. It was once spoken in over 100 settlements, with varying dialects, but in the present day most of these settlements have been abandoned and dialectal differences have largely disappeared.
Classification Nuxalk forms its own subgroup of the Salish language family. Its lexicon is equidistant from Coast and Interior Salish, but it shares phonological and morphological features with Coast Salish (e.g., the absence of pharyngeals and the presence of marked gender). Nuxalk also borrows many words from contiguous North Wakashan languages (especially Heiltsuk), as well as some from neighbouring Athabaskan and Tsimshianic languages.
Phonology
Consonants The consonants of Nuxalk are depicted below in IPA and the practical orthography of Hank Nater's The Bella Coola Language (1984) and Nuxalk-English Dictionary (1990).
Labial AlveolarVelar Uvular Glottal plain sibilant lateral palatal labialized plain labialized Plosive/Affricate pulmonic ~~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ejective Fricative (~) Sonorant plain syllabic () () ()
According to Nater:
Orthographic and are palatals, cognate with postalveolar sibilants in other Salishan languages. /p t/ have voiced and aspirated allophones: optionally voiced between sonorants and aspirated before occlusives and word boundaries (optionally before fricatives); pulmonic dorsals alternate with affricates. has a very low occurrence and is therefore considered marginal.
The sibilants may be realized as entirely alveolar or postalveolar (independently of surrounding palatals) in the idiolects of elders; it is unclear if this is a vestige of historical dialectal divergence.
Orthographic ambiguity
The only word where = and not is 'to constantly turn one's head', from 'to turn s.t. sideways'. The only word where = and not is reduplicated 'great-grandchildren'. Despite being written the same, contrasts with , a trait Nuxalk shares with several other Salishan languages. Syllabic are marked only where phonemically unpredictable, for example (not ) 'to work'.
Vowels
Phonemes Front Back Close Mid Open are pronounced with falling tone and are more open than : .
Allophony According to , the realizations of the vowels based on their position in a segment are as follows: Phoneme Allophone Occurrence surrounded by postvelars ? before rounded velars followed by a consonant or word boundary before a sonorant followed by a consonant or word boundary ? elsewhere before postvelars surrounded by postvelars before a sonorant followed by a consonant or word boundary adjacent to palatovelars elsewhere surrounded by postvelars before rounded velars followed by a consonant or word boundary before a sonorant followed by a consonant or word boundary elsewhere
Phoneme QVQ VW{C,#} VR{C,#} VQ VJ/JV else ? ? Key V = vowel C = consonant # = word boundaryJ = palatovelar W = labiovelar Q = postvelar R = sonorant
Orthography The orthography used in this article is a non-diacritical Bouchard-type practical orthography that originated in Hank Nater's The Bella Coola Language (1984), and was used in his 1990 Nuxalk-English Dictionary. It continues to be used today at for Nuxalk language learning, as well as in Nuxalk documents and names. The Americanist orthography of is provided in addition. The orthographic variants are summarized below.
+ Nuxalk alphabetIPAAPAaāxxʷhiīkk̓kʷk̓ʷlłmnpp̓qq̓qʷq̓ʷstt̓ƛ̓cc̓uūwx̣x̣ʷyʔPracticalaaaccwhiiikkʼkwkwʼllhmnppʼqqʼqwqwʼsttʼtlʼtstsʼuuuwxxwy7
The trigraph lhh (APA łł) is used for //, though not a part of the alphabet.
The occurrence of morpheme-initial /ʔ/ is limited: it is spelled only (I) after prefixes; (II) in enclitics with initial , and ; and (III) in 'determinative', two nouns ( 'sea cucumber', 'turnip'), and three verb roots ( 'forgotten', 'to take', 'to accompany').
As a rule, u cannot be preceded by w. Consequently, rounded velars and post-velars (cw, kw, kwʼ, xw, qw, qwʼ, and clusters thereof), too, are spelled without w before u: 'dipnet', 'bee, wasp', 'maggots', 'he looked at his face', 'to be carving a face', etc.
Syllables The notion of syllable is challenged by the Nuxalk language, in that the language includes long strings of consonants without any intervening vowel or other sonorant. Salishan languages, and especially Nuxalk, are famous for this. For instance, the following words contain only obstruent consonants:
Some examples from :
'to shape, mold something'; 'to blow, hiss' 'to bend something' 'bunchberry' 'then he arrived' term used to address little boys 'to moisten, spray water on something' 'to spit on something/somebody'; 'to go through a hole or passage' 'cold north-east wind' 'to pinch, snap, cut something off; to stop something (short)' 'animal fat' 'that's my animal fat over there' 'fat, grease' 'strong' 'to arrive by boat, land alongshore' 'crooked'
There has been some dispute as to how to count syllables in such words; what, if anything, constitutes the nuclei of those syllables; and if the concept of 'syllable' is even applicable to Nuxalk. However, when recordings are available, the syllable structure can be clearly audible, and speakers have clear conceptions as to how many syllables a word contains. In general, a syllable may be , (where F is a fricative), , or . When C is a stop, CF syllables are always composed of a pulmonic stop () plus a fricative ().
For example, 'thick' is two syllables (), with a syllabic fricative, while in 'stone', 'salt', 'crooked', 'to see' and 'wet' each consonant is a separate syllable: . Stop-fricative sequences can also be disyllabic, however, as in 'strong' (two syllables, at least in the cited recording) and 'rough' (one syllable or two). Syllabification of stop-fricative sequences may therefore be lexicalized or a prosodic tendency. Fricative-fricative sequences also have a tendency toward syllabicity, e.g. with 'bad' being one syllable or two, and 'fat, grease' being two syllables () or three. Speech rate plays a role, with e.g. 'you spat on me' consisting of all syllabic consonants in citation form () but condensed to stop-fricative syllables () at fast conversational speed. This syllabic structure may be compared with that of Miyako.
Sonorants
The linguist Hank Nater has postulated the existence of a phonemic contrast between syllabic and non-syllabic sonorants (the vowel phonemes would then be the syllabic counterparts of ). Words claimed to have unpredictable syllables include: '(born) mute' '(the fact) that they are children' 'to work' 'to beget a child' 'to use a basket'
He also asserts that Nuxalk's syllable structure is unlike other Salishan languages and would be the result of prolonged contact with Oowekyala, from which many obstruent-only roots were borrowed.
Grammar
Typology
Nuxalk is a polysynthetic language with polypersonal agreement. Affix order in transitive events is usually verb–object–subject but verb–subject–object with a 2nd person object.
Events
The first element in a sentence expresses the event of the proposition. It inflects for the person and number of one (in the intransitive paradigm) or two (in the transitive paradigm) participants.
+ Single-participant event inflections 1st 2nd 3rd sg. pl.
The raised numbers refer to three sub-paradigms: stems belonging to sub-paradigm 1 end in a non-nasal sonorant (a, i, u, y, w, l); sub-paradigm 2 stems end in a nasal (m, n); all stems ending in an obstruent belong to sub-paradigm 3. Absence or presence of 3 sg. -s is determined by context (see below), and sub-paradigm 2 -nap/-ap are in free variation, as are sub-paradigm 2 -naw/-aw.
+ Sub-paradigms 1 'blow' 2 'capsize' 3 'work' 1sg. 2sg. 3sg. 1pl. 2pl. 3pl.
As a possessive suffix, nominal -s is compulsory (when the possessor is explicit, it follows the ...-s phrase): 'his wife' 'his knife' 'Mary's husband' 'my father's book'
In subordinate clauses, verbal -s is compulsory: 'at what time will he arrive?' 'where does he live?' 'and that's when the sun sets' 'that's when he went' 'he always works' 'now they saw that it was her' 'he wants to go' 'he got up fast' 'this one is too fat' 'maybe he will come tomorrow'
On the inter-sentential level, verbal -s and -Ø ("zero suffix") differ in that -Ø introduces a new topic, while -s links topics. -Ø can be rendered as 'he/she (...)', and -s as '(...), and he/she (...)':
'I will tell a story about Raven and Mink. Well, Mink was doing things on a beach.'
'They boarded the canoe and went halibut-fishing. Eventually, only Cormorant managed to catch some halibut.'
'The young boy was loved by the man. And the young boy, too, loved the man.' "Tsqm˯na," tsut˯kwʼitsʼik tʼayc. Tsqm-s̠˯kwtutuu tx. '"Now open your mouth," he then said. And, indeed, he did open his mouth.'
The following are the possible person markers for transitive verbs, with empty cells indications non-occurring combinations and '--' identifying semantic combinations which require the reflexive suffix followed by the appropriate intransitive suffix:
+ Two-participant event inflections Transitive inflection Experiencer: singular plural 1 2 3 1 2 3 rowspan="6" rowspan="3" 1 – 2 – 3 rowspan="3" 1 – 2 – 3
E.g. 'the man struck the tree'.
Whether a word can serve as an event is not determined lexically, e.g. 'the thief is a boy', 'the one who is ill is a thief'.
There is a further causative paradigm whose suffixes may be used instead:
+ Causative paradigm Transitive inflection Experiencer: singular plural 1 2 3 1 2 3 rowspan="6" rowspan="3" 1 – 2 – 3 rowspan="3" 1 – 2 – 3
This has a passive counterpart:
+ Passive Causative paradigm Passive Causative Singular Plural 1st Person 2nd Person 3rd Person
This may also have a benefactive gloss when used with events involving less activity of their participant (e.g. 'the man made/let the boy sing'/'the man sang for the boy'), while in events with more active participants only the causative gloss is possible. In the later group even more active verbs have a preference for the affix (implying passive experience) before the causative suffix.
The executor in a transitive sentence always precedes the experiencer. However, when an event is proceeded by a lone participant, the semantic content of the event determines whether the participant is an executor or an experiencer. This can only be determined syntactically if the participant is marked by the preposition , which marks the experience.
Some events are inherently transitive or intransitive, but some may accept multiple valencies (e.g. 'to be needy'/'to want [something]').