''Nenqayni Ch’ih'' (lit. "the Native way") (also Chilcotin, Tŝilhqotʹin, Tsilhqot’in, Tsilhqút’in) is a
Northern Athabaskan language
Northern Athabaskan is a geographic sub-grouping of the Athabaskan language family spoken by indigenous peoples in the northern part of North America, particularly in Alaska (Alaskan Athabaskans), Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. The Nort ...
spoken in
British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...
by the
Tsilhqot’in people.
The name ''Chilcotin'' is derived from the Chilcotin name for themselves: , literally "people of the red ochre river".
Phonology
Consonants
Chilcotin has 47
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
s:
* Like many other
Athabaskan languages
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...
, Chilcotin does not have a contrast between
fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s and
approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
s.
* The alveolar series is
pharyngealized
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the Human pharynx, pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
IPA symbols
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can ...
.
* Dentals and alveolars:
** Both Krauss (1975) and Cook (1993) describe the dental and alveolar as being essentially identical in articulation, ''postdental'', with the only differentiating factor being their different behaviours in the vowel flattening processes (described below).
**Gafos (1999, personal communication with Cook) describes the dental series as ''apico-laminal denti-alveolar'' and the alveolar series as ''lamino-postalveolar''.
Vowels
Chilcotin has 6
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
s:
* Chilcotin has both tense and lax vowel
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s. Additionally, tense vowels may become lax from vowel laxing.
Every given Chilcotin vowel has a number of different phonetic realizations from complex
phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
processes (such as nasalization, laxing, flattening). For instance, the vowel can be variously pronounced .
Tone
Chilcotin is a
tonal language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
with two tones: high tone and low tone.
Phonological processes
Chilcotin has vowel flattening and consonant harmony.
Consonant harmony
Consonant harmony is a type of "long-distance" phonological assimilation, akin to the similar assimilatory process involving vowels, i.e. vowel harmony.
Examples
In Athabaskan languages
One of the more common harmony processes is ''coronal harm ...
(
sibilant
Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...
harmony) is rather common in the Athabaskan language family. Vowel flattening is unique to Chilcotin but is similar to phonological processes in other unrelated Interior
Salishan languages
The Salishan (also Salish) 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). They are characterised by ag ...
spoken in the same area, such as
Shuswap,
St'át'imcets, and
Thompson River Salish (and thus was probably borrowed into Chilcotin). That type of harmony is an
areal feature
In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to ...
common in this region of North America. The Chilcotin processes, however, are much more complicated.
Vowel nasalization and laxing
Vowel nasalization is a phonological process by which the phoneme is nasalizes the preceding vowel. It occurs when the vowel + sequence is followed by a (tautosyllabic)
continuant consonant (such as ).
Vowel laxing is a process by which tense vowels () become lax when followed by a syllable-final : the tense and lax distinction is
neutralized.
Vowel flattening
Chilcotin has a type of
retracted tongue root
In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mong ...
harmony
In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. However ...
. Generally, "flat" consonants lower vowels in both directions.
Assimilation is both progressive and regressive.
Chilcotin consonants can be grouped into three categories: neutral, sharp, and flat.
* Flat consonants trigger vowel flattening.
* Sharp consonants block vowel flattening.
* Neutral consonants do not affect vowel flattening in any way.
The flat consonants can be further divided into two types:
# a -series (i.e. etc.), and
# a -series (i.e. etc.).
The -series is stronger than the -series by affecting vowels farther away.
This table shows both unaffected vowels and flattened vowels:
The vowel surfaces as if after a flat consonant and as before a flat consonant:
The progressive and regressive flattening processes are described below.
=Progressive flattening
=
In the ''progressive'' (left-to-right) flattening, the -series consonants affect only the immediately following vowel:
Like the -series, the stronger -series consonants affects the immediately following vowel. However, it affects the vowel in the following
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
as well if the first flattened vowel is a lax vowel. If the first flattened is tense, the vowel of the following syllable is not flattened.
Thus, the neutral consonants aretransparen in the flattening process. In the first word 'he's comatose', flattens the of the first syllable to and the of the second syllable to . In the word 'I'm sleeping', flattens to . Since, however, the vowel of the first syllable is , which is a tense vowel, the cannot flatten the of the second syllable.
The sharp consonants, however, block the progressive flattening caused by the -series:
=Regressive flattening
=
In regressive (right-to-left) harmony, the -series flattens the preceding vowel.
The regressive (right-to-left) harmony of the -series, however, is much stronger than the progressive harmony. The consonants flatten all preceding vowels in a word:
Both progressive and regressive flattening processes occur in Chilcotin words:
References
External links
The Chilcotin Language(YDLI)
(YDLI)
Official Tsilhqot'in Language Website
Bibliography
* Andrews, Christina. (1988). Lexical Phonology of Chilcotin. (unpublished M.A. thesis, University Of British Columbia).
* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Clements, G. N. (1991). A Note on Chilcotin Flattening. (unpublished manuscript).
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1976). A Phonological Study of Chilcotin and Carrier. A Report to the National Museums of Canada. (unpublished manuscript).
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1983). Chilcotin Flattening. ''Canadian Journal of Linguistics'', ''28'' (2), 123-132.
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1986). Ambisyllabicity and Nasalization in Chilcotin. In ''Working Papers for the 21st International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages'' (Pp. 1–6). Seattle: University Of Washington.
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1989). Articulatory and Acoustic Correlates of Pharyngealization: Evidence from Athapaskan. In D. Gerdts & K. Michelson (Eds.), ''Theoretical Perspectives on Native American Languages'' (Pp. 133–145). Albany: State University of New York Press.
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1989). Chilcotin Tone and Verb Paradigms. In E.-D. Cook & K. Rice (Eds.), ''Athapaskan Linguistics'' (Pp. 145–198). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
* Cook, Eung-Do. (1993). Chilcotin Flattening and Autosegmental Phonology. ''Lingua'', ''91'' 12/3, 149-174.
* Cook, Eung-Do; & Rice, Keren (Eds.). (1989). ''Athapaskan Linguistics: Current Perspectives on a Language Family''. Trends in Linguistics, State of-the-art Reports (No. 15). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. .
* Gafos, Adamantios. (1999). ''The Articulatory Basis of Locality in Phonology''. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. . (revised version of the author's Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University).
* Hansson, Gunnar O. (2000). Chilcotin Vowel Flattening and Sibilant Harmony: Diachronic Cues to a Synchronic Puzzle. (Paper presented at the Athabaskan Language Conference, Moricetown, British Columbia, June 10).
* Krauss, Michael E. (1975). Chilcotin Phonology, a Descriptive and Historical Report, with Recommendations for a Chilcotin Orthography. Alaskan Native Language Center. (unpublished manuscript).
* Krauss, Michael E., and Victor K. Golla (1981) ''Northern Athapaskan Languages'', In June Helm (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Subarctic, Vol. 6. Smithsonian Institution, Washington.
* Latimer, R. M. (1978). A Study of Chilcotin Phonology. (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary).
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The Languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chilcotin Language
Tsilhqot'in
Northern Athabaskan languages
Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau
First Nations languages in Canada