Native to Canada, United States | ||
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Region Southern British Columbia into Northern Washington Ethnicity Duwamish, Snohomish, Suquamish, Sammamish, Snoqualmie, Puyallup, Sahewamish, Skagit, Nisqually Native speakers no fully fluent native speakers as of 2008 some second-language speakers Language family Salishan
Coast Salish
Central
Lushootseed ISO 639-3 Variously:
lut – Lushootseed
slh – Southern Puget Sound Salish
ska – Skagit (covered by [lut])
sno – Snohomish (covered by [lut]) | ||
Lushootseed (also: xʷəlšucid, dxʷləšúcid, Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish or Skagit-Nisqually) is the language or dialect continuum of several Salish Native American tribes of modern-day Washington state. Lushootseed is a member of Coast Salish, one of two main divisions of the Salishan language family.
Contents
Phonology
Lushootseed has a complex consonantal phonology, with 41 distinct consonant phonemes. Along with more common voicing and labialization contrasts, Lushootseed has a plain-glotallic contrast, which is realized as laryngealized with sonorants, ejective with voiceless stops or fricatives, and implosive for /b/.
Related languages and current status
Lushootseed, like its neighbour Twana, is in the Southern Coast Salish subgroup of the Salishan family of languages. The language was spoken by many Puget Sound region peoples, including the Duwamish, Steilacoom, Suquamish, Squaxin Island Tribe, Muckleshoot, Snoqualmie, Nisqually, and Puyallup in the south and the Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Skagit, and Swinomish in the north.
Ethnologue quotes a source published in 1990 (and therefore presumably reflecting the situation in the late 1980s), according to which there were 60 fluent speakers of Lushootseed, evenly divided between the northern and southern dialects. On the other hand, the Ethnologue's list of United States languages also lists, alongside Lushootseed's 60 speakers, 100 speakers for Skagit, 107 for Southern Puget Sound Salish, and 10 for Snohomish (a dialect on the boundary between the northern and southern varieties). Some sources given for these figures, however, go back to the 1970s when the language was less critically endangered. Linguist Marianne Mithun has collected more recent data on the number of speakers of various Native American languages, and could document that by the end of the 1990s there were only a handful of elders left who spoke Lushootseed fluently. The language was extensively documented and studied by linguists with the aid of tribal elder Vi Hilbert, d. 2008, who was the last speaker with a full native command of Lushootseed. There are efforts at reviving the language, and instructional materials have been published.
Language revitalization
As of 2013, the Tulalip Tribes' Lushootseed Language Department teaches classes in Lushootseed, and its website offers a Lushootseed "phrase of the week" with audio. The Tulalip Montessori School teaches Lushootseed to young children. As of 2013, an annual Lushootseed conference is held at Seattle University. A course in Lushootseed language and literature has been offered at Evergreen State College. Lushootseed has also been used as a part of environmental history courses at Pacific Lutheran University. It has been spoken during the annual Tribal Canoe Journey (Tribal Journeys) that take place throughout the Salish Sea.
There are also efforts within the Puyallup Tribe. Their website and social media, aimed at anyone interested in learning the language, are updated often.
In the summer of 2016, the first ever adult immersion program in Lushootseed was offered at the University of Washington's Tacoma campus. It was taught by Assistant Professor Danica Miller, a member of the Puyallup Tribe, in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.
Subdivisions
Lushootseed consists of two dialect groups which can be further divided into subdialects:
Alphabet
According to work published by Vi Hilbert and other Lushootseed language specialists, Lushootseed uses a morphophonemic writing system meaning that it is a phonemic alphabet which changes to reflect the pronunciation such as when an affix is introduced. The chart below is based on the Lushootseed Dictionary. Typographic variations such as p' and p̓ do not indicate phonemic distinctions.
Some vocabulary
The Lushootseed language originates from the coastal region of Northwest Washington State and the Southwest coast of Canada. Many of the words in the Lushootseed language are related to the environment and the fishing economy that surrounded the Salish tribes. The following tables show different words from different Lushootseed dialects relating to the salmon fishing and coastal economies.