Upper Chehalis language

Upper Chehalis ( ; ) is a Tsamosan language historically spoken by the Satsop and Upper Chehalis people in western Washington state.

Classification

Upper Chehalis is within the Tsamosan branch of the Salishan language family. Within the Tsamosan languages, Upper Chehalis is within the Inland branch, alongside Cowlitz. Despite its name, it is more closely related to Cowlitz than Lower Chehalis, which is within the Maritime branch alongside Quinault.

The Proto-Salish language likely originated north on the Salish Sea, near the mouth of the Fraser River. The ancestors of the speakers of the Tsamosan branch likely branched off around the same time as the Interior Salishan languages branched off, settling south of Puget Sound, eventually occupying as far as the Pacific Coast. These speakers were the ancestors of the Tsamosan languages today. Before they reached the coast, another branch headed further south and became the ancestors of the Tillamook language on the Oregon Coast.

History

The language was originally spoken on the Chehalis River in southwestern Washington, from around Elma upriver to Rainbow Falls. In Upper Chehalis, the language and people are called , derived from the name for Mud Bay, , suggesting that it was probably at one point also spoken along Mud Bay on Puget Sound. The language was spoken by the Satsop on the Satsop River and the five aboriginal bands of Upper Chehalis on the Chehalis River: the on the Black River and Mud Bay, the around Oakville, the around Tenino, the around Chehalis, and the around Pe-Ell and Boistfort.

By the 1970s, the language was moribund with only one competent speaker remaining. In 1991, an Upper Chehalis dictionary was published by linguist M. Dale Kinkade. Most of the material in the language was compiled from two primary sources in the 1960s and 1970s: Silas Heck and Lillian Young, two native speakers living on the Chehalis Reservation. Other secondary sources were used, including other Chehalis people living on the reservation and in nearby communities who knew some of the language, as well as tapes made in the 1950s by Leon Metcalf and other collected notes on vocabulary from a variety of sources.

Phonology

Alphabet

The Upper Chehalis language uses a variation of the Americanist phonetic notation, itself a variant of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In Upper Chehalis, long vowels and sequences of vowel-glottal stop are in free variation but are represented with a long vowel, marked with '·', such as 'a·' or 'e·'. Otherwise, vowel length is ignored in writing. Additionally, an epenthetic is regularly added before resonants in consonant clusters and after initial resonants followed by consonants; this is not written either.

Stress is marked with an acute accent ◌́.

Dialects

Upper Chehalis has three dialects: Satsop, Oakville Chehalis, and Tenino Chehalis. Because of the lack of data, the exact boundaries of these dialects cannot be determined. Kinkade supposed that Tenino was spoken upriver of Grand Mound, and that of the five Upper Chehalis bands, the and spoke Oakville Chehalis, while the , , and spoke Tenino Chehalis. Kinkade himself coined the terms "Oakville Chehalis" and "Tenino Chehalis"; previously they had been called "Upper Chehalis 1" and "Upper Chehalis 2" by Franz Boas. The Tenino dialect had also been referred to as "Staktamish".

The distinguishing feature between Tenino Chehalis and Oakville Chehalis is the phonemes [] [] and [] in Oakville and [] [] and [] in Tenino. The Tenino dialect is thus connected to the neighboring Cowlitz language, which also uses [] [] and [].

The Satsop dialect was originally spoken by the Satsop people. Although they spoke Upper Chehalis, they were more closely affilated with the Lower Chehalis groups downriver. For this reason, Satsop contains many vocabulary items from the Lower Chehalis language.

Vocabulary

Notes

References

Bibliography

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External links

Upper Chehalis
(Intercontinental Dictionary Series)
* Upper Chehalis at Ethnologue

Coast Salish languages
Languages extinct in the 2000s
Languages of Washington (state)
Salishan languages
Tsamosan languages

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