- Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language
language
name=Squamish
nativename=Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim
pronunciation=sqʷχʷuʔməʃ sniʧim
familycolor=American
states=Canada
region=British Columbia
speakers=≈12-15 [Dyck (2004: 5, n. 4), citing Peter Jacobs of the Squamish Nation, and Cook, Eung-Do (1992). "Amerindian Languages of Canada". Ch. 10 of W. D. O'Grady and M. Dobrovolsky, eds., "Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: An Introduction". Toronto: Copp Clark Pittman, pg. 368)]
fam1=Salishan
fam2=
iso2=
iso3=squThe Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language (also called Squamish; in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, "Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim", meaning "Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language"), is of the Coast Salish language family spoken bySḵwxwú7mesh (Squamish) people of southwesternBritish Columbia ,Canada , centred on their reserve communities in the town of Squamish and the cities of North Vancouver and West Vancouver. An archaic historical rendering of "Sḵwx̱wú7mesh" is "Sko-ko-mish" but this should not be confused with the name of the Skokomish people ofWashington state.Anthropologists and linguists who have worked on the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language go back to the 1880s. The first collection of words was done by a German anthropologists
Franz Boas . The following decade another anthropologist,Charles Hill-Tout , also collected some Sḵwx̱wú7mesh words, sentences, and stories. In the 1930s another anthropologist, Homer Barnett, worked with Jimmy Frank. He collected information about traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh culture. Some Sḵwx̱wú7mesh words were a part of this. Then in the 1950s a Dutch linguist, Aert J. Kuipers, worked on the first comprehensive grammar of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language. In 1968 the BC Language Project undertook more documentation of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language and culture. Randy Bouchard and Dorthy Kennedy were the main collaborators on this project. They devised the present writing system that is used for the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh language.Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim ("snichim" means "language") is most closely related to the Sháshíshálh, Halkomelem and Nooksack languages.
Phonology
The
phoneme s of Sḵwxwú7mesh, given in the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh alphabet, are as follows: [Dyck (2004: 6, 33)]There are also four vowel phonemes, IPA|/a/, IPA|/i/, IPA|/u/, and IPA|/ə/ (spelled respectively "a", "i", "u", and "e").
ee also
*Sḵwx̱wú7mesh people
*Squamish Nation References
Bibliography
*Dyck, Ruth Anne (2004). "Prosodic and Morphological Factors in Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh) Stress Assignment". Dissertation for University of Victoria. Retrieved [https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/dspace/bitstream/1828/71/1/Dyck.pdf online] (PDF) on
August 14 ,2007 .External links
* [http://www.ydli.org/biblios/squabib.htm Bibliography at Yinka Dene Language Institute]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.