Lushootseed

Lushootseed has a complex consonantal phonology and 4 vowel phonemes. Along with more common voicing and labialization contrasts, Lushootseed has a plain-glottalic contrast, which is realized as laryngealized with sonorants, ejective with voiceless stops or fricatives.

Lushootseed can be considered a relatively agglutinating language, given its high number of morphemes, including a large number of lexical suffixes. Word order is fairly flexible, although it is generally considered to be verb-subject-object (VSO).[14]

Lushootseed is capable of creating grammatically correct sentences that contain only a verb, with no subject or object. All information beyond the action is to be understood by context. This can be demonstrated in ʔuʔəy’dub '[someone] managed to find [someone/something]'.[15] Sentences which contain no verb at all are also common, as Lushootseed has no copula. An example of such a sentence is stab əw̓ə tiʔiɫ 'What [is] that?'.[16]

Despite its general status as VSO, Lushootseed can be rearranged to be subject-verb-object (SVO) and verb-object-subject (VOS). Doing so does not modify the words themselves, but requires the particle ʔə to mark the change. The exact nature of this particle is the subject of some debate.

Prepositions in Lushootseed are almost entirely handled by one word, ʔal, which can mean 'on, above, in, beside, around' among a number of potential other meanings. They come before the object they reference, much like in English. Examples of this can be found in the following sentences:

1. stab əw̓ə tiʔiɫ ʔal tə stuləkʷ 'What is that in the river?'
2. ʔuyayus ti dbad ʔal tudiʔ 'My Father is working over there.'
3. šəqabac ʔal ti piit 'On top of the bed.' (this example is interesting as šəqabac actually means 'on top of a large/bulky object' on its own, but still contains the ʔal preposition)

Determiners usually come before a noun they belong to, and have two possible genders "masculine" and "feminine". However, in a sentence reordered to become SVO, such as sqʷəbayʔ ti ʔučalatəb ʔə tiʔiɬ wiw'su 'The dog is what the children chased' the determiner for sqʷəbayʔ 'dog' comes after the noun, instead of before it. Gender primarily manifests in the addition of an -s- within the determiner, generally following immediately after the first letter of the word, i.e. tiʔiɫ 'that' becomes tsiʔiɫ, te 'the, a' becomes tse, ti 'this' becomes tsi.

Lushootseed has four subject pronouns: čəd 'I' (first-person singular), čəɫ 'we' (first-person plural), čəxʷ 'you' (second-person singular), and čələp 'you' (second-person plural). It does not generally refer to the third person in any way. The subject pronoun always comes in the second position in the sentence. For example dxʷləbiʔ čəxʷ ʔu 'Are you Lummi?' as compared to xʷiʔ čəd lədxʷləbiʔ 'I am not Lummi'. Here, negation takes the first position, the subject pronoun takes the second, and Lummi is pushed to the end of the sentence.[15]

Negation in Lushootseed takes the form of an adverb xʷiʔ 'no, none, nothing' which always comes at the beginning of the sentence that is to be negated. It is constructed in two possible ways, one for negatives of existence, and one for negatives of identity. If taking the form of a negative of identity, a proclitic lə- must be added to the sentence on the next adverb. If there are no further adverbs in the sentence, the proclitic attaches to the head word of the predicate, as in the sentence xʷiʔ čəxʷ sixʷ ləbakʷɬ 'Don't get hurt again'.[15]

Lushootseed, like its neighbors Twana, Nooksack, Klallam, and the North Straits Salish languages, are in the Central Coast Salish subgroup of the Salishan family of languages.[17] The language is spoken by many peoples in the Puget Sound region, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Squaxin, Muckleshoot, Snoqualmie, Nisqually, and Puyallup in the south and the Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Upper Skagit, and Swinomish in the north.

Bust of Chief Seattle with accompanying text in Lushootseed: ti šišəgʷł gʷəl al tiʔəʔəxʷ sgʷaʔčəł səxʷəsłałlilčəł siʔał dəgʷi gʷəl liiiiləxʷ dʔiišəd cəłul̕ul̕ cəł ʔəslax̌ədxʷ ti gʷaalapu

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.[18] On the other hand, the Ethnologue 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).[18] 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.[1] There are efforts at reviving the language, and instructional materials have been published.

As of 2013, the Tulalip Tribes' Lushootseed Language Department teaches classes in Lushootseed,[5][6] and its website offers a Lushootseed "phrase of the week" with audio.[19] The Tulalip Montessori School also teaches Lushootseed to young children.[7]

Wa He Lut Indian School teaches Lushootseed to Native elementary school children in their Native Language and Culture program.

As of 2013, an annual Lushootseed conference is held at Seattle University.[9] A course in Lushootseed language and literature has been offered at Evergreen State College.[20] Lushootseed has also been used as a part of environmental history courses at Pacific Lutheran University.[1] 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.[8]

To facilitate the use of Lushootseed in electronic files, in 2008 the tribe contracted type designer Juliet Shen to create Unicode-compliant typefaces that met the needs of the language. Drawing upon traditional Lushootseed carvings and artwork, she developed two typefaces: Lushootseed School and Lushootseed Sulad.[21][22]

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 sponsored by The Puyallup Tribal Language Program in partnership with University of Washington Tacoma and its School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.[23] A similar program is scheduled to be offered in August 2019, with the instructors Danica Sterud Miller, Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma, and Zalmai Zahir, a PhD student of theoretical linguistics at the University of Oregon.[24]

Lushootseed consists of two main dialect groups, Northern Lushootseed (dxʷləšucid) and Southern Lushootseed (txʷəlšucid~xʷəlšucid). Both of these dialects can then be broken down into further subdialects:[2]

• Northern Lushootseed
  • (Upper) Skagit
  • Lower Skagit/Swinomish
  • Sauk-Suiattle
  • Snohomish
• Southern Lushootseed
  • Skykomish
  • Snoqualmie
  • Suquamish
  • Duwamish
  • Muckleshoot
  • Puyallup
  • Nisqually
  • Squaxin/Sahewamish

Dialects differ in several ways. Pronunciation between dialects is different. In Northern dialects, the stress of the word generally falls on the first non-schwa of the root, whereas in the Southern dialects, stress usually is placed on the penultimate syllable. Some words do not fit the pattern, but generally, pronunciation is consistent in those ways. Northern Lushootseed also was affected by progressive dissimilation targeting palatal fricatives and affricates, whereas Southern Lushootseed was not, leading to some words like čəgʷəš ("wife") being pronounced čəgʷas in Northern dialects.[2]

Different dialects often use completely different words. For example, the word for "raccoon" is x̌aʔx̌əlus in Northern Lushootseed, whereas bəlups is used in Southern Lushootseed.[2]

Morphology also differs between Northern and Southern Lushootseed. Northern Lushootseed and Southern Lushootseed have related, but different determiner systems. There are also several differences in utilizing the prefix for marking "place where" or "reason for," in subordinate clauses, with Northern Lushootseed using dəxʷ- and Southern Lushootseed using sxʷ-.[2]

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 does not change 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 ⟨pʼ⟩ do not indicate phonemic distinctions. Capital letters are not used in Lushootseed.[25]

Some older works based on the Dictionary of Puget Salish distinguishes between schwas that are part of the root word and those inserted through agglutination which are written in superscript.[26]

See the external links below for resources.

The Lushootseed language originates from the coastal region of Northwest Washington State and the Southwest coast of Canada. There are words in the Lushootseed language which 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.

For a list of words relating to Lushootseed, see the Lushootseed category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Lushootseed test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• Puyallup Tribal Language Program
• The Tulalip Lushootseed Department's Website
• Keyboards and fonts for typing in Lushootseed
• Interactive alphabet app through the Tulalip Lushootseed Department
• “History professor helps keep local Native American language alive” by Drew Brown for PLU Scene Magazine
• The Lushootseed Peoples of Puget Sound Country
• Lushootseed Research
• Dr. David Beck, Salishan Language specialist
• Developing a corpus for Lushootseed (archived)