Lushootseed

Name

Lushootseed has been historically known as Niskwalli/Nisqually, Puget Sound Salish, Puget Salish, Pugué, Squaxon, Skagit, and Skagit-Nisqually.

The name of the language in Lushootseed is pronounced (and spelled) variably across different dialects. In the northern dialects, the language is called . In most southern dialects, it is , whereas in the Muckleshoot and Snoqualmie dialect, it is pronounced . The southern pronunciation is derived from the original by de-voicing d into t and switching the position of l and ə.

The English name Lushootseed is derived from . The prefix along with the suffix means . The root word, , is an archaic word for the Puget Sound region. Some scholars, such as Wayne Suttles, believe it may be an old word for , possibly related to the word Salish.

Classification and current status

Lushootseed, like its neighbors Twana, Nooksack, Klallam, and the North Straits Salish languages, are in the Central Coast Salish subgroup of the Salishan family of languages. The language is spoken by many peoples in the Puget Sound region, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Squaxin, Muckleshoot, Snoqualmie, Nisqually, and Puyallup in the south and the Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Upper Skagit, and Swinomish in the north.

Ethnologue quotes a source published in 1990 (and therefore presumably reflecting the situation in the late 1980s), according to which there were 60 fluent speakers of Lushootseed, evenly divided between the northern and southern dialects. On the other hand, the Ethnologue list of United States languages also lists, alongside Lushootseed's 60 speakers, 100 speakers for Skagit, 107 for Southern Puget Sound Salish, and 10 for Snohomish (a dialect on the boundary between the northern and southern varieties). Some sources given for these figures, however, go back to the 1970s when the language was less critically endangered. Linguist Marianne Mithun has collected more recent data on the number of speakers of various Native American languages, and could document that by the end of the 1990s there were only a handful of elders left who spoke Lushootseed fluently. The language was extensively documented and studied by linguists with the aid of tribal elder Vi Hilbert, d. 2008, who was the last speaker with a full native command of Lushootseed. There are efforts at reviving the language, and instructional materials have been published.

In 2014, there were only five second-language speakers of Lushootseed. As of 2022, although there were not yet native speakers, there were approximately 472 second-language Lushootseed speakers, according to data collected by the Puyallup Tribe. By their definition, a "speaker" includes anyone who speaks in Lushootseed for at least an hour each day.

Revitalization

, the Tulalip Tribes' Lushootseed Language Department teaches classes in Lushootseed, and its website has Lushootseed phrases with audio. The Tulalip Montessori School also teaches Lushootseed to young children. Tulalip Lushootseed language teachers also teach at the Tulalip Early Learning Academy, Quil Ceda-Tulalip Elementary in the Marysville School District, Totem Middle School, and Marysville-Getchell, Marysville-Pilchuck and Heritage High Schools. Since 1996, the Tulalip Lushootseed Department has hosted the annual , a summer language camp for children. Teachers also offer family classes in the evening every year, making Lushootseed a family experience.

Wa He Lut Indian School teaches Lushootseed to Native elementary school children in their Native Language and Culture program.

, an annual Lushootseed conference is held at Seattle University. A course in Lushootseed language and literature has been offered at Evergreen State College. Lushootseed has also been used as a part of environmental history courses at Pacific Lutheran University. It has been spoken during the annual Tribal Canoe Journeys that takes place throughout the Salish Sea.

There are also efforts within the Puyallup Tribe. Their website and social media, aimed at anyone interested in learning the language, are updated often.

To facilitate the use of Lushootseed in electronic files, in 2008 the Tulalip Tribes contracted type designer Juliet Shen to create Unicode-compliant typefaces that met the needs of the language. Drawing upon traditional Lushootseed carvings and artwork, she developed two typefaces: Lushootseed School and Lushootseed Sulad. The Nisqually tribe contracted the Language Conservancy to make a Lushootseed Keyboard for mobile devices.

The University of Washington has long been involved in Lushootseed research and teaching. Lushootseed was first taught on the Seattle campus in 1972 by Thom Hess, a linguistics professor, and the following year he turned over the class to Vi Hilbert, who would be the last native speaker. From 1973 to 1988, Vi Hilbert taught Lushootseed on the Seattle campus. Hess and Hilbert published a Lushootseed dictionary and readers in the 1990s. In the summers of 2016 and 2017, an adult immersion program in Lushootseed was offered at the University of Washington's Tacoma campus. It was sponsored by The Puyallup Tribal Language Program in partnership with University of Washington Tacoma and its School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Southern Lushootseed classes started in 2018 on the University of Washington's Seattle campus, taught by Tami Hohn, a Puyallup tribal member.

Dialects

Lushootseed consists of two main dialect groups, Northern Lushootseed () and Southern Lushootseed (txʷəlšucid~xʷəlšucid). Both of these dialects can then be broken down into subdialects:

• Northern Lushootseed
  • (Upper) Skagit
    • Lower Skagit (Swinomish)
  • Sauk
  • Snohomish (Tulalip)
• Southern Lushootseed
  • Skykomish
  • Snoqualmie
  • Suquamish
  • Duwamish
  • Muckleshoot
  • Puyallup
  • Nisqually
  • Squaxin/Sahewamish The Lower and Upper Skagit dialects have variously been categorized as being different from one another, or one and the same, but are both recognized as being distinct from the Sauk dialect. There is no consensus on whether the Skykomish dialect should be grouped into Northern or Southern Lushootseed.

Dialects differ in several ways. Pronunciation between dialects is different. In Northern dialects, the stress of the word generally falls on the first non-schwa of the root, whereas in the Southern dialects, stress usually is placed on the penultimate syllable. Some words do not fit the pattern, but generally, pronunciation is consistent in those ways. Northern Lushootseed also was affected by progressive dissimilation targeting palatal fricatives and affricates, whereas Southern Lushootseed was not, leading to some words like čəgʷəš ("wife") being pronounced in Northern dialects.

Different dialects often use completely different words. For example, the word for "raccoon" is in Northern Lushootseed, whereas bəlups is used in Southern Lushootseed.

Morphology also differs between Northern and Southern Lushootseed. Northern Lushootseed and Southern Lushootseed have related, but different determiner systems. There are also several differences in utilizing the prefix for marking "place where" or "reason for," in subordinate clauses, with Northern Lushootseed using and Southern Lushootseed using sxʷ-.

See Determiners for more information on this dialectical variation.

Phonology

Lushootseed has a complex consonantal phonology and 4 vowel phonemes. Along with more common voicing and labialization contrasts, Lushootseed has a plain-glottalic contrast, which is realized as laryngealized with sonorants, and ejective with voiceless stops or fricatives.

Consonants

Lushootseed has no phonemic nasals. However, the nasals , , , and may appear in some speech styles and words as variants of and .

Vowels

Orthography

According to work published by Vi Hilbert and other Lushootseed-language specialists, Lushootseed uses a morphophonemic writing system meaning that it is a phonemic alphabet which does not change to reflect the pronunciation such as when an affix is introduced. The chart below is based on the Lushootseed Dictionary. Typographic variations such as and do not indicate phonemic distinctions. Capital letters are not used in Lushootseed.

Some older works based on the Dictionary of Puget Salish distinguishes between schwas that are part of the root word and those inserted through agglutination which are written in superscript.

The Tulalip Tribes of Washington's Lushootseed Language Department created a display with nearly all the letters in the Lushootseed alphabet, except the letter b̓, which is a rare sound which no words begin with.

See the external links below for resources.

Morphology and verbs

Main article: Lushootseed grammar

Verb prefixes

Almost all instances of a verb in Lushootseed (excluding the zero copula) carry a prefix indicating their tense and/or aspect. Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of these prefixes, along with their meanings and applications.

The prefix ʔəs- is one of the most common. It indicates an imperfective aspect-present tense (similar to English '-ing') for verbs that do not involve motion. More specifically, a verb may use ʔəs- if it does not result in a change of position for its subject. It is commonly known as a "state of being":ʔəsƛ̕ubil čəd. 'I am feeling fine.' or 'I am in good health.'If a verb does involve motion, the ʔəs- prefix is replaced with *lə-:*ləƛ̕a čəd ʔálʔal. 'I'm going home.' Completed or telic actions use the prefix ʔu-. Most verbs without ʔəs- or lə- will use ʔu-. Some verbs also exhibit a contrast in meaning between lə- and ʔu-, and only one of them is correct:ʔusaxʷəb čəxʷ. 'You jump(ed).' The verb saxʷəb literally means 'to jump, leap, or run, especially in a short burst of energy', and is correctly used with ʔu-. In contrast, the verb təlawil, which means 'to jump or run for an extended period of time', is used with *lə-:*lətəlawil čəxʷ. 'You are jumping.'

Possession

There are five possessive affixes, derived from the pronouns:

The third person singular -s is considered marginal and does not work with an actual lexical possessor.

Syntax

Main article: Lushootseed grammar

Lushootseed can be considered a relatively agglutinating language, given its high number of morphemes, including a large number of lexical suffixes. Word order is fairly flexible, although it is generally considered to be verb-subject-object (VSO).

Lushootseed is capable of creating grammatically correct sentences that contain only a verb, with no subject or object. All information beyond the action is to be understood by context. This can be demonstrated in ʔuʔəy'dub '[someone] managed to find [someone/something]'. Sentences which contain no verb at all are also common, as Lushootseed has no copula. An example of such a sentence is stab əw̓ə tiʔiɫ 'What [is] that?'.

Despite its general status as VSO, Lushootseed can be rearranged to be subject-verb-object (SVO) and verb-object-subject (VOS). Doing so does not modify the words themselves, but requires the particle ʔə to mark the change. The exact nature of this particle is the subject of some debate.

Prepositions in Lushootseed are almost entirely handled by one word, ʔal, which can mean 'on, above, in, beside, around' among a number of potential other meanings. They come before the object they reference, much like in English. Examples of this can be found in the following phrases:

1. stab əw̓ə tiʔiɫ ʔal tə stuləkʷ 'What is that in the river?'
2. ʔuyayus ti dbad ʔal tudiʔ 'My father is working over there.'
3. šəqabac ʔal ti piit 'On top of the bed.'

Pronouns

Lushootseed has four subject pronouns: čəd 'I' (first-person singular), čəɬ 'we' (first-person plural), čəxʷ 'you' (second-person singular), and čələp 'you' (second-person plural). It does not generally refer to the third person in any way.

The subject pronoun always comes in the second position in the sentence:dxʷləbiʔ čəxʷ ʔu 'Are you Lummi?'

xʷiʔ čəd lədxʷləbiʔ 'I am not Lummi.' Here, negation takes the first position, the subject pronoun takes the second, and 'Lummi' is pushed to the end of the sentence.

Negation

Negation in Lushootseed takes the form of an adverb xʷiʔ 'no, none, nothing' which always comes at the beginning of the sentence that is to be negated. It is constructed in two possible ways, one for negatives of existence, and one for negatives of identity. If taking the form of a negative of identity, a proclitic lə- must be added to the sentence on the next adverb. If there are no further adverbs in the sentence, the proclitic attaches to the head word of the predicate, as in the sentence xʷiʔ čəxʷ sixʷ ləbakʷɬ 'Don't get hurt again'.

Vocabulary

The Lushootseed language originates from the coastal region of Northwest Washington State and the Southwest coast of Canada. There are words in the Lushootseed language which are related to the environment and the fishing economy that surrounded the Salish tribes. The following tables show different words from different Lushootseed dialects relating to the salmon fishing and coastal economies.

Sample text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Lushootseed:

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Notes

References

Bibliography

• {{Cite book

Language-learning materials

• Bates, D., Hess, T., & Hilbert, V. (1994). Lushootseed Dictionary. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
• Beck, David. "Transitivity and causation in Lushootseed morphology." Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle 13 (1996): 11–20.
• {{Cite book
• Chamberlain, Rebecca, Lushootseed Language & Literature: Program reader. (Lushootseed language, cultural, and storytelling traditions.)
• {{Cite book
• Hess, Thom and Vi Hilbert. Lushootseed Book 1; The language of the Skagit, Nisqually, and other tribes of Puget Sound. An Introduction. Lushootseed Press 1995
• Hess, Thom and Vi Hilbert. Lushootseed Book 2 (Advanced Lushootseed). Lushootseed Press, 1995
• {{Cite book
• Hilbert, Vi. Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound. Seattle: University of Washington, 1985
• Hilbert, Vi, Crisca Bierwest, Thom Hess. Way of the Lushootseed People; Ceremonies & Traditions of North Puget Sound's First People. Third Edition, Lushootseed Press, 2001
• dxʷlešucid xʷgʷədgʷatəd tul̓ʔal taqʷšəblu; Some Lushootseed Vocabulary from taqʷšəblu. Lushootseed Press, 1993

References

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30. Zahir, Zalmai. (December 2018). "Elements of Lushootseed Grammar in Discourse Perspective".
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33. (27 December 2016). "sƛ̓əladiʔ – Alphabet/Sounds".
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