Rahul Sharma (Editor)

Lillooet language

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Native to
  
Canada

Native speakers
  
140 (2014, FPCC)

Region
  
British Columbia

ISO 639-3
  
lil

Ethnicity
  
6,670 St’át’imc (2014, FPCC)

Language family
  
Salishan Interior Salish Northern Lillooet

Lillooet /ˈlɪloʊɛt/, also known as St’át’imcets ([ˈst͡ɬʼæt͡ɬʼemxət͡ʃ]), is the Interior Salishan language of the St’át’imc, spoken in southern British Columbia, Canada, around the middle Fraser and Lillooet Rivers. The language of the Lower Lillooet people uses the name Ucwalmícwts, because St’át’imcets means "the language of the people of Sat’", i.e. the Upper Lillooet of the Fraser River.

Contents

Lillooet is an endangered language with as few as 200 native speakers practically all of whom are over 60 years of age (Gordon 2005).

Regional varieties

St'at'imcets has two main dialects:

  • Upper St’at’imcets (AKA St’át’imcets, Fountain)
  • Lower St’at’imcets (AKA Lil'wat7úlmec, Mount Currie)

    • Upper St'at'imcets is spoken around Fountain, Pavilion, Lillooet, and neighboring areas. Lower St'at'imcets is spoken around Mount Currie and neighboring areas. An additional subdialect called Skookumchuck is spoken within the Lower St'at'imcets dialect area, but there is no information available in van Eijk (1981, 1997) (which are the main references for this article). A common usage used by the bands of the Lower Lillooet River below Lillooet Lake is Ucwalmicwts.

    The "Clao7alcw" (Raven's Nest) language nest program at Mount Currie, home of the Lil’wat, is conducted in the Lil’wat language."

    As of 2014, "the Coastal Corridor Consortium— an entity made up of board members from First Nations and educational partners to improve aboriginal access to and performance in postsecondary education and training— ... [has] developed a Lil’wat-language program."

    Consonants

    St'at'imcets has 44 consonants:

  • Obstruents consist of the stops, affricates, and fricatives. There are 22 obstruents.
  • Sonorants consist of the nasals and approximants. There are 22 sonorants.
  • Glottalized stops are pronounced as ejective consonants. Glottalized sonorants are pronounced with creaky voice: /ˀn/ = [n̰].
  • The glottalized consonants of St'at'imcets contrast not only with plain consonants, but also with sequences of plain consonant + glottal stop, or glottalized consonant + glottal stop, in either order. This holds for both the obstruents and the sonorants: [ɣʷ] ≠ [ɣʷʼ] ≠ [ʔɣʷ] ≠ [ɣʷʔ] ≠ [ʔɣʷʼ] ≠ [ɣʷʼʔ] and [k] ≠ [kʼ] ≠ [ʔk] ≠ [kʔ] ≠ [ʔkʼ] ≠ [kʼʔ].
  • The dental approximants /z, zʼ/ are pronounced alternatively as interdental fricatives [ð, ð̰] or as dental fricatives [z̪, z̪̰], depending on the dialect of St'at'imcets.
  • There are four pairs of retracted and nonretracted consonants (which alternate morphophonemically). Retraction on consonants is essentially velarization, although additionally, nonretracted /t͡ʃ/ is phonetically laminal [t͡ʃ̻] whereas retracted /t͡ʃ̠/ is apical [t͡ʂ̺]. (Note also that St'at'imcets has retracted-nonretracted vowel pairs.)
  • /t͡ʃ/ - /t͡ʃ̠/
  • /ʃ/ - /ʃ̠/
  • /l/ - /ḻ/
  • /lʼ/ - /ḻʼ/
  • Among the post-velar consonants, the obstruents /q, qʷ, q͡χʼ, q͡χʷʼ, χ, χʷ/ are all post-velar (pre-uvular) [k̠, k̠ʷ, k̠͡x̠ʼ, k̠͡x̠ʷʼ, x̠, x̠ʷ] whereas the approximants [ʕ, ʕʷ, ʕʼ, ʕʷʼ] are either pharyngeal or true uvulars.

    • Vowels

    St'at'imcets has 8 vowels:

  • The phonetic realization of the phonemes are indicated in brackets to the right.
  • All retracted vowels are indicated by a line under the vowel. These retracted vowels alternate morphophonemically. (Note that St'at'imcets also has retracted consonants.)
  • The non-retracted vowel /a/ ranges from [ɛ~æ]. Because retracted /e̠/ and non-retracted /a/ can both pronounced [ɛ], there is often phonetic overlap.

    • Phonological processes

  • epenthetic /ə/.

    • Post-velar Harmony (retraction):

  • Within roots, there is a restriction that all consonant and vowel retracted-nonretracted pairs must be of the same type. That is, a root may not contain both a retracted and a nonretracted vowel or consonant. This is a type of Retraced Tongue Root harmony (also called pharyngeal harmony) involving both vowels and consonants that is an areal feature of this region of North America, shared by other Interior Salishan and non-Salishan languages (for example see Chilcotin vowel flattening).
  • In addition to the root harmony restriction, some suffixes harmonize with the root to which they are attached. For instance, the inchoative suffix /-ɣʷélʼx/ -wil’c:

    • Orthography

    The following table shows the vowels and consonants and their respective orthographic symbols.

    Grammar

    St'at'imcets has two main types of words:

    1. full words
      1. variable words
      2. invariable words
    2. clitics
      1. proclitics
      2. enclitics

    The variable word type may be affected by many morphological processes, such as prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and glottalization.

    St’át’imcets, like the other Salishan languages, exhibits predicate/argument flexibility. All full words are able to occur in the predicate (including words with typically 'nouny' meanings such as nk’yap 'coyote', which in the predicate essentially means 'to be a coyote') and any full word is able to appear in an argument, even those that seem "verby", such as t’ak 'go along', which as a noun, is equivalent the noun phrase 'one that goes along'.

    Reduplication

    St’át’imcets, as is typical of the Salishan family, has several types of reduplication (and triplication) that have a range of functions such as expressing plural, diminutive, aspect, etc.

    A more complicated type of reduplication is the internal reduplication used to express the diminutive. In this case the consonant before a stressed vowel is reduplicated after the stressed vowel and usually the vowel then changes to e (IPA: [ə]). Examples are below:

    More than one reduplicative process can occur in a given word:

    St’át’imcets has several other variants of the above types. Reduplication is further complicated by consonant glottalization (see van Eijk (1997) for details).

    Mood and modality

    The subjunctive mood appears in nine distinct environments, with a range of semantic effects, including:

  • weakening an imperative to a polite request,
  • turning a question into an uncertainty statement,
  • creating an ignorance free relative.

    • The St’át’imcets subjunctive also differs from Indo-European subjunctives in that it is not selected by attitude verbs.

    St’át’imcets has a complex system of subject and object agreement. There are different subject agreement paradigms for transitive vs. intransitive predicates. For intransitive predicates, there are three distinct subject paradigms, one of which is glossed as ‘subjunctive’ by van Eijk (1997) and Davis (2006)

    Sample text

    The following is a portion of a story in van Eijk (1981:87) told by Rosie Joseph of Mount Currie.

    St'at'imcets:

    Nilh aylh lts7a sMáma ti húz̓a qweqwl’el’tmínan. N̓as ku7 ámlec áku7 tsípunsa. Nilh t’u7 st’áksas ti xláka7sa. Tsicw áku7, nilh t’u7 ses wa7, kwánas et7ú i sqáwtsa. Wa7 ku7 t’u7 áti7 xílem, t’ak ku7 knáti7 ti pú7y̓acwa. Nilh ku7 t’u7 skwánas, lip̓in̓ás ku7. Nilh ku7 t’u7 aylh stsuts: "Wa7 nalh aylh láti7 kapv́ta!" Nilh ku7 t’u7 aylh sklhaka7mínas ku7 láti7 ti sqáwtsa cwilhá k̓a, nao7q̓ spawts ti kwanensása...

    English translation:

    This time it is Máma I am going to talk about. She went that way to get some food from her roothouse. So she took along her bucket. She got there, and she stayed around, taking potatoes. She was doing that, and then a mouse ran by there. So she grabbed it, she squeezed it. So she said: "You get all squashed now!" So she opened her hand and she let go of what turned out to be a potato, it was a rotten potato that she had caught....

    References

    Lillooet language Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA