The Thompson language, also known as , also known as Nlaka'pamuctsin, also known as the Nlaka'pamux ('Nthlakampx') language, is an Interior Salishan language spoken in the

Fraser Canyon The Fraser Canyon is a major landform of the Fraser River where it descends rapidly through narrow rock gorges in the Coast Mountains en route from the Interior Plateau of British Columbia to the Fraser Valley. Colloquially, the term "Fraser Ca ...

, Thompson Canyon, Nicola Country of the

Canadian province Canada has ten provinces and three territories that are sub-national administrative divisions under the jurisdiction of the Constitution of Canada, Canadian Constitution. In the 1867 Canadian Confederation, three provinces of British North Amer ...

British Columbia British Columbia is the westernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Situated in the Pacific Northwest between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains, the province has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that ...

, and formerly in the North Cascades region of Whatcom and Chelan counties of the state of Washington in the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. A dialect distinctive to the Nicola Valley is called Scw'exmx, which is the name of the subgroup of the Nlaka'pamux who live there.

Phonology

Nlaka'pamuctsin is a

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

-heavy language. The consonants can be divided into two subgroups: obstruents, which restrict airflow, and sonorants or resonants, which do not. The sonorants are often

syllabic consonant A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...

s, which can form syllables on their own without

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

Consonants

Vowels

Stress is used with an acute accent; á.

Writing Systems

One of the writing systems used for Nlaka'pamuctsin uses the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA) writing system. The above consonant chart is based off the one found in "The Thompson Language" by Laurence C. Thompson & M. Terry Thompson.

Morphology and syntax

Researchers working in the Generative tradition have speculated that Salishan languages lack lexical categories such as nouns and verbs. Evidence for such an absence of contrast between parts of speech in Nlaka'pamuctsin come from a lack of clear morphological markers (e.g.

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

s) that differentiate nouns and verbs. Instead, generative linguists discuss morphology and

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

in Salishan based on a framework of predicates and particles. However, more contemporary work suggests a changing understanding of Salishan grammar. Some Salishanists believe that functional categories are not prescriptive of lexical categories. Work in Functional linguistics suggests that other factors beyond morphological evidence code lexical categories in languages. In Salishan, the distinction would be less overt than in some other languages.

Lexical suffixes

One morphological feature of Nlaka'pamuctsin is lexical suffixes. These are words that add nuance to predicates and can be affixed to the ends of root words to add their general meaning to that word. Thompson and Thompson assert that as a result of English language influence, speakers are using these more complex predicates less and less in favor of simpler predicates with complements and adjuncts, resulting in “a general decline in the exploitation of the rich synthetic resources of the language.”

References

External links

Native.Languages.org entry
(archive of SchoolNet page)

{{Indigenous peoples in Washington Interior Salish languages First Nations languages in Canada Languages of the United States Indigenous languages of the North American Plateau