16 Facts About Salishan languages

Salishan languages are a family of languages of the Pacific Northwest in North America (the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana).

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.

Terms Salish and Salishan languages are used interchangeably by linguists and anthropologists studying Salishan languages, but this is confusing in regular English usage.

All Salishan languages are considered critically endangered, some extremely so, with only three or four speakers left.

Those Salishan languages considered extinct are often referred to as "sleeping Salishan languages", in that no speakers exist currently.

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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.

In contrast to classifications made by linguistic scholars, many Salishan languages groups consider their particular variety of speech to be a separate language rather than a dialect.

Edward Sapir suggested that the Salishan languages might be related to the Wakashan and Chimakuan languages in a hypothetical Mosan family.

Syntax of Salish Salishan languages is notable for its word order, its valency-marking, and the use of several forms of negation.

Some Salishan languages are ergative, or split-ergative, and many take unique object agreement forms in passive statements.

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 (as in Secwepemc, Nlaka'pamuctsin, Twana, Straits Salishan languages, and Halkomelem).

Beck does concede, however, that the Lushootseed argument ti ?ux? above) does represent an example of an unmarked 'verb' used as an argument and that further research may potentially substantiate M Dale Kinkade's 1983 position that all Salishan content words are essentially 'verbs' (such as ?ux? 'goes' and sbiaw 'is a coyote') and that the use of any content word as an argument involves an underlying relative clause.

Variation between the Salishan languages seems to depend on two main factors: the distance between speech communities and the geographic barriers between them.

Indeed, cognate lists between various Salishan languages show more similarities in religious terminology than they do in technology and environment vocabulary.

The Coast Salishan languages are less similar to each other than are the Interior Salishan languages, probably because the Coast communities have more access to outside influences.