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Kwakʼwala or Kwak̓wala (), previously known as Kwakiutl (), is a Wakashan language spoken by about 450
Kwakwakaʼwakw The Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw (), also known as the Kwakiutl (; "Kwakʼwala-speaking peoples"), are an indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, indigenous group of the Pacific Northwest Coast, in southwestern Canada. Their total population, ...
people around Queen Charlotte Strait in
Western Canada Western Canada, also referred to as the Western provinces, Canadian West, or Western provinces of Canada, and commonly known within Canada as the West, is a list of regions of Canada, Canadian region that includes the four western provinces and t ...
. It has shared considerable influence with other languages of the Pacific Northwest, especially those of the unrelated Salishan family. While Kwakʼwala is severely
endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching, inv ...
, revitalization efforts are underway to preserve the language. While Kwakʼwala had no written records until European contact, archeological and linguistic evidence shed light on its prehistory. Northern and Southern branches of the Wakashan language family split approximately 2,900 years ago. Northern Wakashan (or Kwakiutlan) speakers likely expanded outward from the north of
Vancouver Island Vancouver Island is an island in the northeastern Pacific Ocean and part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The island is in length, in width at its widest point, and in total area, while are of land. The island is the largest ...
, displacing Salishan languages on the mainland of what is now
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 ...
. Kwakʼwala was first written by missionaries during the colonization of the Pacific Northwest. As part of its policy of forced cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, the Canadian government suppressed Kwakʼwala and outlawed its attendant culture through the late 19th to mid-20th centuries; elders and second-language learners are currently rebuilding its speaking population. Kwakʼwala is morphologically complex, having many suffixes conveying distinct meanings such as mood, aspect, and
person A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...
, with multiple of these meanings often existing in a single suffix. Kwakʼwala has suffixes marking the subject,
object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...
, and instrument within a phrase and spatial relationships including distance from and visibility to the speaker. These suffixes can trigger
consonant mutation Consonant mutation is change in a consonant in a word according to its morphological or syntactic environment. Mutation occurs in languages around the world. A prototypical example of consonant mutation is the initial consonant mutation of al ...
in the stem which they inflect. It is also phonologically complex, having a rich consonant inventory containing phonemes – being distinct sound units – uncommon in languages worldwide.


History

The use of Kwakʼwala declined significantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to the
assimilationist Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or fully adopts the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. The melting pot model is based on this concept. A relat ...
policies of the Canadian government, and above all the mandatory attendance of Kwakwaʼwakw children at residential schools. Although Kwakʼwala and Kwakwakaʼwakw culture have been well-studied by linguists and anthropologists, the efforts did not reverse the trends leading to language loss. According to Guy Buchholtzer, "The anthropological discourse had too often become a long monologue, in which the Kwakwakaʼwakw had nothing to say." As a result of these pressures, there are relatively few Kwakʼwala speakers today, and most remaining speakers are past the age of child-raising, which is considered crucial for language transmission. As with many other indigenous languages, there are significant barriers to language revitalization. However, a number of revitalization efforts have recently attempted to reverse language loss for Kwakʼwala. A proposal to build a Kwakwakaʼwakw First Nations Centre for Language Culture has gained wide support. In August 2021 a Culture Camp for youth was launched in Bond Sound called Nawalakw or "Supernatural" in Kwakʼwala. The project's goal is to revitalize the language, and to be a place where Kwak̓wala is spoken fluently by community members of all ages. A review of revitalization efforts in the 1990s shows that the potential to fully revitalize Kwakʼwala still remains, but serious hurdles also exist. The language is taught at The Uʼmista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, British Columbia. In 2012, the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre on Quadra Island received funding for shelving to display its collection of First Nations books for the benefit of Kwakʼwala speakers. A Kwakʼwala
iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...
app was released in December 2011. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at the First Voices Kwakʼwala Community Portal. Th
Kwakwala Bible Portions
were put online by the Canadian Bible Society in 2020. With funding from the nonprofit Mitacs, researchers Sara Child and Caroline Running Wolf have combined technology and indigenous pedagogy to provide multiple resources for learning Kwakʼwala. As of 2022, they seek to use virtual or augmented reality along with text-to-speech software to create an immersive learning experience for Kwakʼwala learners.


Dialects

The (meaning "speakers of Kwakʼwala") are an ethnic group comprising multiple tribes sharing the Kwakʼwala language. However, the Kwakʼwala spoken by each tribe exhibits often significant dialectal differences. There are four major unambiguous dialects of Kwakʼwala: Kwak̓wala, ʼNak̓wala, G̱uc̓ala and T̓łat̓łasik̓wala.


Liqʼwala

In addition to those dialects, there are also Kwakwakaʼwakw tribes that speak Liqʼwala. Liqʼwala has sometimes been considered to be a dialect of Kwakʼwala and sometimes a separate language. The standard orthography for Liqʼwala is quite different from the most widely used orthography for Kwakʼwala.


Phonology

Kwakʼwala phonology exhibits many traits of the Northwest Coast
Sprachbund A sprachbund (, from , 'language federation'), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. Th ...
of which it is a part. They include a large phonemic inventory with a very rich array of consonantal contrasts and relatively few vowel phonemes, frequent use of a reduced vowel //, contrastively
glottalized Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent conso ...
sonorant consonants, the existence of ejectives at all
places of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...
, and the presence of lateral affricates.


Consonants

The consonantal inventory of Kwakʼwala includes a three-way
airstream Airstream is an American brand of travel trailer easily recognized by the distinctive shape of its rounded and polished aluminum coachwork. This body shape dates back to the 1930s and is based on the Bowlus Road Chief, an earlier model of the ...
contrast in
plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...
s (voiceless, voiced, and ejective). There is an extensive series of distinctions between rounded and non-rounded consonants in the dorsal region. Notably, there are no velar consonants without secondary articulation: they are all either palatalized or labialized. The consonants are shown in the following table.


Vowels

The vowels of Kwakʼwala are /a e i o u ə/. There is a phonemic length distinction as well; however, not all vowels exist in both long and short versions. The phonemic status of some of the vowels in question is relatively unclear, as especially evident in the case of /a/ and /ə/. They often interchange in different instances of the same stem or suffix, depending on the phonological content. presents some cases of
complementary distribution In linguistics, complementary distribution (as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation) is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...
between /a/ and /É™/ but concludes that those vowels must be underlyingly distinct in some other cases. analyzes that only the vowels /É™/ and /a/ are phonemic, with the remaining ones being allophonic: /i/ from ; /u/ from ; /e/ from ; and ''o'' from .


Suprasegmentals

Stress placement depends on
syllable weight In linguistics, syllable weight is the concept that syllables pattern together according to the number and/or duration of segments in the rime. In classical Indo-European verse, as developed in Greek, Sanskrit, and Latin, distinctions of syllabl ...
. A syllable is heavy if it has a long vowel or a moraic coda; otherwise it is light. A moraic coda is a non-glottalized sonorant. Thus, /pən/ counts as a heavy syllable, while /pət/ is light . If a word has any heavy syllables, primary stress falls on the leftmost heavy syllable. Otherwise, primary stress falls on the rightmost syllable. Secondary stress also occurs, but its distribution is less well understood. According to , secondary stress falls on the second syllable following the primary stress and iteratively thereafter on every second syllable. This statement may be amended to take into account the observation of that epenthetic vowels never bear stress, including secondary stress, and they seem to be invisible when syllables are counted for the assignment of secondary stress. Kwakʼwala appears to have an otherwise unattested pattern of repair strategies for coda condition violations. Underlyingly voiced consonants are devoiced word-finally but surface faithfully with following epenthesis when they are word-internal. Glottalized consonants remain glottalized when word-final but surface with a following epenthetic vowel when they are word-internal .


Morphophonology

Kwakʼwala has a rich morphological system which, like other Wakashan languages, is entirely
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...
ing (except for
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...
). Like its sister languages, Kwakʼwala morphology is notable for the complex effects that certain suffixes trigger or correlate with in the stems to which they affix. There are two basic categories of changes associated with suffixes:
fortition In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i ...
, or
lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...
, of a stem-final consonant, and expansion of stem material through vowel lengthening or reduplication.


Hardening and weakening

Suffixes fall into three classes according to their behaviour: ''weakening, hardening,'' and ''neutral''. Weakening and hardening suffixes alter the stem to which they attach by changing the features of the stem-final consonant. Following the Boasian orthographic tradition, the suffix types are indicated by a symbol preceding the suffix: ⟨-⟩, ⟨=⟩ or ⟨-!⟩, respectively. Weakening suffixes trigger
lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...
in some cases. Plain voiceless stops and affricates are changed to their voiced equivalent. The behaviour of fricatives is somewhat less systematic. The sibilant alternates with or , depending on the root. The velar alternates with . Both and alternate with , but does not change in a weakening context. The lateral alternates with both �and . Sonorants weaken by becoming glottalized. In addition to the somewhat unpredictable set of changes, the patterns involved in weakening are further complicated by the fact that some suffixes weaken stops but do not affect fricatives. Boas lists 11 suffixes weakening stops and affricates but not fricatives; these suffixes are indicated by the notation ⟨=⟩ as seen in the following list: /=/ "continuously"; /=/ "mouth, opening, to talk about"; /=/ "away"; /=/ or /=/ "to do something while doing something else" – weakens ; (=) "continuing motion in a definite direction" – weakens , , ; (=) "to go attend, to be on the way"; /=/ "place where there are many (plants etc.)" – does not weaken ; /=/ "canoe"; /=/ "in front of house, body, mountain"; /=/ "by force"; /=/ "moving on water". Hardening suffixes trigger
fortition In articulatory phonetics, fortition, also known as strengthening, is a consonantal change that increases the degree of stricture. It is the opposite of the more common lenition. For example, a fricative or an approximant may become a stop (i ...
in most cases. Stem-final plain stops or affricates or sonorants become glottalized. As with weakening suffixes, the hardening patterns of fricatives are less predictable. hardens to or . (The classification is apparently arbitrary and not necessarily consistent with the weakening behavior of a given stem; a stem in which becomes when weakened may become either or when it is hardened, etc.) hardens to . Both and harden to , while in a hardening context surfaces with an additional following glottal stop: . hardens to . The table below illustrates how various roots weaken and harden.


Stem expansion

In addition to fortition and lengthening, suffixes may also be associated with lengthening or reduplication effects on the stems which precede them. distinguishes seven classes of suffix (with many subclasses), which all have different effects on some of the twenty possible root shapes which he identifies: ''Key:'' The chart follows the one given in , with a few alterations. Root shapes refer to an initial consonant C, a nucleus ' or a full vowel V, and final consonants including plain voiceless obstruents (T), voiced obstruents (D), glides (Y), other sonorants (R) and glottalized versions of each of T and R (Tʼ and Rˀ). Cells show the effect of suffixes belonging to the various classes (columns) on roots or stems of various shapes (rows). = indicates that the suffix leaves the stem unchanged. – indicates that the suffix triggers vowel lengthening in the stem (often causing to turn into ). A cell with a vowel ( or ) indicates that the stem vowel is replaced with the vowel in the cell. Several symbols occurring together with + in the middle indicates that reduplication occurs; the symbols on each side of + indicate the shape of each syllable of the reduplicative stem. For example, class 7 suffixes added to C1 roots trigger reduplication on the pattern -+= which means that the reduplicative stem has two syllables, with the first syllable long and the second syllable preserving the length of the original stem. ˘ indicates a short copy; thus a 6a suffix on a D root will produce a reduplicative stem, with the second syllable being short and the first syllable having a nucleus . C refers to one of the stem consonants. Stress marks show the location of primary stress in the suffixed form. In non-reduplicative forms, they indicate that the stem itself bears stress. In reduplicative forms, stress marks indicate which stem syllable bears stress. When no stress mark is included, stress assignment follows the regular pattern for Kwakʼwala stress. Cells with multiple options are given as in the original chart; it is not clear whether the optionality is systematic in any way. A few symbols whose meaning is unclear have been retained directly, as given in Boas. These include V and v. The symbol -" corresponds to a special symbol in the original chart (a
dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...
with trema); its meaning is also unclear. A few corrections to the original chart are made in the version above. Class 2 suffixes are listed in this chart as "all -", i.e. lengthening all stems. However, all the class 2 suffixes described by Boas which productively apply to roots of type B or C leave stems unchanged rather than triggering lengthening. This also adheres to the phonotactics of Kwakʼwala, which do not allow super-heavy syllables of the type which would be created by lengthening these stems. Therefore, the chart above treats class 2 suffixes as causing no change in roots of these types. Additionally, several forms in the original chart have "-" in place of "+" in reduplicative forms. They are taken as errors here, and corrected in the chart above. Root classes C2 and C3 are included in this chart as they are included in his chart even though there are no known roots belonging to these classes (which would presumably have the shapes CəRR and CəRY). Root class B3 is included with the changes noted in the original chart although states that there are no known roots of this type. An example of a suffix that triggers stem changes is -! "exclusively; real, really; just only; common," which belongs to class 3f. Its effect on roots of various shapes is shown in the following table.


Other word-formation processes

In addition to suffix-driven reduplication, word formation may also involve reduplication not tied to any suffix. There are at least two reduplication patterns.


Morphosyntax

Expansion of stems through suffixation is a central feature of the language, which transforms a relatively small lexicon of roots into a large and precise vocabulary. Different linguistic analyses have grouped these suffixes into classes in various ways, including "formative" vs. "incremental" and "governing" vs. "restrictive". rejects these morphosyntactic classifications and divides suffixes into various classes based mainly on semantic criteria. Nevertheless, there are morphosyntactic facts that distinguish classes of suffixes, including suffix ordering and the existence of paradigms for certain suffix types. At a minimum, there is sufficient evidence from syntax and phonology to distinguish between stem-forming suffixes and inflectional suffixes. The classes are comparable to the distinction between derivational and
inflection In linguistic Morphology (linguistics), morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical category, grammatical categories such as grammatical tense, ...
al morphology although they are not necessarily homologous with them.


Stem-forming suffixes

The suffixes in Kwakʼwala can be grouped into at least nineteen different classes, principally on semantic grounds. In the order given by Boas, the classes correspond generally but not completely to the order in which these suffixes appear within a word: # General locatives: e.g. ''='' "away" (' "to go away for shame"); ''='' "on a flat object" (' "sea hunter on flat, i.e. Orion"). # Special locatives: e.g. ''-'' "round opening, eye, door" (' "to miss a round place"); ''='' "open space, bottom of sea, world, beach, in body" (' "round thing in stomach"). # Special locatives referring to body parts: e.g. ''-!'' "throat" (' "to have hanging on chest"); ''-!'' "in mind" (' "to begin to say in mind"). # Limitations of form: Generally used with numerals, e.g. ''='' "human beings" (' "two persons"); ''-'' "long" (' "only once along street of village"). # Temporal suffixes: e.g. ''-'' "recent past" (' "he went (about a week ago)"); ''-'' "used to be, to do" (' "used to be a canoe-builder"). # Suffixes creating a transitive verb: e.g. ''-'', which turns a static or intransitive verb or a noun into a transitive verb: cf. ' "water-tight" and ' "to make water-tight"; and ' "tallow" and ' "to put tallow on". # Aspect: e.g. ''-'' "continuously" (''-!'' "to sleep continuously, all the time"); ''-'' "to be in the position of performing an act" (' "to be at rest"). # Plurality (human): i.e. ''-'' (' "they took"). # Mode: e.g. ''-'' "hypothetical" (' "if you should be asked"); ''-'' "exhortative" (' "do not let us do so!") # Passive: e.g. ''='' "passive of verbs with instrumental" (' "it is paid to the midwife"); ''-'' "passive of verbs expressing sensations and mental actions; also sensations produced by outer actions" (' "to be affected by a furuncle"). # Restriction of subject: e.g. ''-'' "some" (' "some of them vomit in house"); ''-'' "some" (' "some are unripe"). # Nominal suffixes: e.g. ''-!'' "season" (' "season of scarcity of food"); ''='' "the one by whom one is owned as" (' "master (i.e. the one by whom one is owned as a slave)"). # Verbal suffixes: e.g. ''='' "to die of inner troubles" (' "to die of longing"); ''-'' "to pretend" (' "to pretend to cry"). # Adverbial/adjectival suffixes: e.g. ''-'' "real, really" (' "your real supernatural power"); ''-'' "large" (' "a great number of sea otters"). # Source of information: e.g. ''-'' "it is said" (' "very much, it is said"); ''-'' "in a dream" (' "in a dream it was seen that he went"). # Degree of certainty: e.g. ''-'' "perhaps" (' "you perhaps"); ''-'' "emphatic certainty" (' "I am going to go"). # Conjunctions: e.g. ''-'' "referring to a previous subject of conversation or narrative"; ''-'' "but, on his part". # Emotional attitudes: e.g. ''-'' "astonishing!" (' "is that you?!"); ''-'' "oh if!" (''-'' "oh, if he would come!"). # Auxiliary suffixes: e.g. ''-'' "motion without cessation, away" (' "to lift a load out of a canoe"); ''-'' "plural of locative suffixes" (' "to stand in a row in the house").


Inflectional suffixes

There are two major types of inflectional suffixes in Kwakʼwala: verbal suffixes that modify a predicate; and nominal
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s, which may agree with a noun present in the sentence, or may be entirely
pronominal In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not con ...
.


Verbal inflection

A typologically notable feature of Kwakʼwala is the distinction made in verbal conjugation between visible and invisible subjects. A distinction is also made between subjects that are near the listener and those that are far. The verb paradigm for ' "to go" (classified as a Paradigm 2 verb) illustrates these properties :


Nominal inflection

An entity can be present in a sentence in one of three ways: as a full overt noun, as a pronoun, or without any overt exponent. In each case, the entity will also be represented by an agreement clitic. If the entity takes the form of a noun or pronoun, the clitic will be from the prenominal set; if the entity has no overt exponent, a pronominal clitic will be used. Clitics always precede the nominal with which they agree, which violates the generalization that Kwakʼwala affixes are always suffixing. However, the clitic always forms a phonological word with the preceding word rather than the nominal, with the result that the suffixing generalization is always true as far as the phonology is concerned. Verbal suffixes are shown in the following table: Because first and second person entities are always deictically accessible, there is no distinction between demonstrative and non-demonstrative clitics. However, third person clitics are distinguished in this way. As with verbal inflection, agreement clitics distinguish entities that are near and far and entities that are visible and invisible. Pronominal demonstrative clitics are shown in the following table (1 indicates an entity near the speaker; 2 indicates an entity near the hearer; 3 indicates an entity distant from both hearer and speaker): Prenominal demonstrative clitics do not distinguish between visible and invisible entities. They are divided into two classes: ''consonantal'' forms (which precede proper names, indefinite nouns, and third person possessive forms whose possessor is not the subject of the sentence) and ''vocalic'' forms (which precede all other nouns and pronouns): Another set of suffixes is used to simultaneously indicate the subject and object/instrument, as shown in the following tables. (When the extension of the subject and object/instrument overlap, no suffix is available. Another construction must be used to express this kind of reflexive relation.) In the preceding table, forms with a first person object do not use a verbal suffix. Rather, they use a
periphrastic In linguistics and literature, periphrasis () is the use of a larger number of words, with an implicit comparison to the possibility of using fewer. The comparison may be within a language or between languages. For example, "more happy" is periph ...
auxiliary form of the verb ' "to come". The auxiliary precedes the main verb in the sentence. Suffixation is also used for
genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...
constructions. These suffixes can be either prenominal/pronominal or postnominal. First person genitives allow either form. Third person genitives observe a robust differentiation between those cases in which the subject and possessor are the same entity and those in which they are not. In the former case, the instrumental suffix ''-'' is added to the prenominal genitive marker, and the possessed noun take the postnominal demonstrative genitive ending. In the latter case, the instrumental ''-'' attaches to the postnominal genitive ending on the possessed noun, and the prenominal suffix remains unchanged. The following table shows genitive suffixes for first and second person possessors. Prenominal forms include a distinction between first and second person while the distinction in postnominal forms is made by adding the pronominal verbal inflection for the appropriate person. Genitive suffixes with a third-person possessor are shown in the following table: Prenominal forms for the objective and instrumental are formed by suffixing the prenominal forms given above to ''-'' or ', respectively. Independent pronouns also exist in Kwakʼwala. Pronouns have verbal and nominal forms. Verbal forms inflect like other verbs. Nominal forms occur in subject, object, and instrumental forms. The full set of pronouns is shown in the following table: Object forms are clearly related to ' "to come" (in the first person) and ' "to go" (in the second and third person).


Syntax

Kwakʼwala formally distinguishes only three classes of words: predicates/substantives, particles, and exclamatory forms. Nouns and verbs are distinguished mainly by syntactic context. Thus, the bare form ' "sit" is a verb; combined with an article-like particle, it serves as a noun: ' "the one who sits" . A minimal sentence consists of a predicate. Although that is syntactically simple, it is not necessarily semantically impoverished. The rich morphological system of Kwakʼwala allows the expression of many features in a single predicate: ' "I shall try to get you to be my wife"; ' "I have this one for my husband (lit. I am husband owner of him)" . In sentences with greater syntactic complexity, word order is identical to the order in which inflectional morphemes are added to a stem, stem/predicate-subject-direct object-instrument-direct object: A number of
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s are used to mark agreement with nouns, including clitics for
definiteness In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases that distinguishes between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those that are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical ...
/
deixis In linguistics, deixis () is the use of words or phrases to refer to a particular time (e.g. ''then''), place (e.g. ''here''), or person (e.g. ''you'') relative to the Context (language use), context of the utterance. Deixis exists in all known na ...
and
case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...
(including
accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...
and
instrumental case In grammar, the instrumental case ( abbreviated or ) is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the ''instrument'' or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or ...
). Clitics are positioned at the left edge of the noun they agree with but lean phonologically to their left. The result is a systematic mismatch between syntactic and phonological constituent structure such that on the surface, each prenominal word appears to be inflected to agree with the following noun. That can be seen in the preceding example: the sentence-initial predicate ' includes a clitic /''-ida''/, which belongs together with the nominal ' in terms of syntactical constituency. That nominal, in turn, includes a clitic /''-χa''/, syntactically connected to the following noun, and so on.


Orthography

Word lists and some documentation of Kwakʼwala were created from the early period of contact with Europeans in the 18th century. The first systematic work to record the language was done by Rev Alfred James Hall (1853–1918) who was an English missionary with the Anglican Church Mission Society (CMS) North Pacific Mission in British Columbia. He arrived at Fort Rupert in 1881 and worked amongst the Kwakuitl people at Fort Rupert and Alert Bay. He learnt the Kwakʼwala language, and created an orthography for the language based upon the Latin alphabet used by English. He produced portions of the Book of Common Prayer in 1888 which was published by the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) is a United Kingdom, UK-based Christians, Christian charity. Founded in 1698 by Thomas Bray, it has worked for over 300 years to increase awareness of the Christians, Christian faith in the Un ...
(SPCK). This was expanded in 1900. He produced a Grammar of the language in 1889. He translated some books of the New Testament which were published by the
British and Foreign Bible Society The British and Foreign Bible Society, often known in England and Wales as simply the Bible Society, is a non-denominational Christian Bible society with charity status whose purpose is to make the Bible available throughout the world. The ...
in London. He produced the Gospel of Matthew in 1882, the Gospel of John in 1884, the Gospel of Mark in 1890, the Gospel of Luke in 1894 and then the Book of Acts in 1897. Another attempt to record the language was made by
Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...
in the late 19th and early 20th century. However, Boas was not solely responsible for the data collection of the Kwakʼwala language; George Hunt provided tens of thousands of pages of the language in which he worked with Boas to officially document. Through this data collection, Boas and Hunt developed a systematic orthography for documentation of Kwakʼwala, which captured almost all of the important distinctions in the language (although some features, such as vowel length and stress, were not recorded systematically). Although the Boasian orthography was able to capture almost all of the important features of Kwakʼwala, it was difficult for Kwakʼwala speakers to use: it was impossible to write with a standard typewriter due to its abundant use of special symbols, and it used some standard letters very differently from English orthography, which was familiar to many Kwakwakaʼwakw. A practical orthography, developed by the Kwakwakaʼwakw linguist David Grubb, became the standard system for writing Kwakʼwala. Practical writing of Kwakʼwala today is typically done in the orthography promoted by the Uʼmista Cultural Society, which largely resembles the Grubb orthography. Variants of this orthography allow for easier computer typesetting. For example, instead of marking ejective consonants with an apostrophe printed above the consonant, the apostrophe may be printed as a separate character following the consonant. Linguistic works on Kwakʼwala typically use an IPA or Americanist transcription.


Uʼmista Cultural Society alphabet


References


Bibliography

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External links


Kwakwala Bible Portions

FirstVoices Kwak̓wala PortalUʼmista Cultural Society

Archive copy

First Peoples' Cultural FoundationLiq̓ʷala interactive alphabet
{{Authority control Wakashan languages Indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations languages in Canada Endangered Wakashan languages