St'at'imcets language

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St'at'imcets (also Lillooet, Lilloet, St’át’imcets) is an Interior Salishan language spoken in southern British Columbia, Canada around the middle Fraser and Lillooet rivers by the St'at'imc people. The dialect of the Lower Lillooet people uses the name Ucwalmícwts^[1] as St'at'imcets properly means "the language of the people of Sat', i.e. the Upper Lillooet of the Fraser River.

St'at'imcets is an endangered language with as few as 200 native speakers practically all of whom are over 60 years of age (Gordon 2005).

Regional varieties

St'at'imcets has two main dialects:

• Upper St’at’imcets (a.k.a. St’aá’imcets, Fountain)
• Lower St’at’imcets (a.k.a. Lil'wat7úlmec, Mount Currie)

Upper St'at'imcets is spoken around Fountain, Pavilion, Lillooet, and neighboring areas. Lower St'at'imcets is spoken around Mount Currie and neighboring areas. An additional subdialect called Skookumchuck is spoken within the Lower St'at'imcets dialect area, but there is no information available in van Eijk (1981, 1997) (which are the main references for this article).

Sounds

Consonants

St'at'imcets has 44 consonants:

• Obstruents consist of the stops, affricates, and fricatives. There are 22 obstruents.
• Sonorants consist of the nasals and approximants. There are 22 resonants.
• Glottalized stops are pronounced as ejective consonants. Glottalized sonorants are pronounced with creaky voice: /nʼ/ = [n̰].
• The glottalized consonants of St'at'imcets contrast not only with plain consonants, but also with sequences of plain consonant + glottal stop, or glottalized consonant + glottal stop, in either order. This holds for both the obstruents and the sonorants: [ɣʷ] ≠ [ɣʷʼ] ≠ [ʔɣʷ] ≠ [ɣʷʔ] ≠ [ʔɣʼʷ] ≠ [ɣʼʷʔ] and [k] ≠ [kʼ] ≠ [ʔk] ≠ [kʔ] ≠ [ʔkʼ] ≠ [kʼʔ].
• The dental approximants /z, zʼ/ are pronounced alternatively as interdental fricatives [ð, ð̰] or as dental fricatives [z̪, z̪̰], depending on the dialect of St'at'imcets.
• There are four pairs of retracted and nonretracted consonants (which alternate morphophonemically). Retraction on consonants is essentially velarization, although additionally, nonretracted /ʧ/ is phonetically laminal [ʧ̻] while retracted /ʧ̱/ is apical [ʧ̱̺]. (Note also that St'at'imcets has retracted-nonretracted vowel pairs.)
  • /ʧ/ - /ʧ̱/
  • /ʃ/ - /ʃ̱/
  • /l/ - /ḻ/
  • /l’/ - /ḻʼ/
• Among the post-velar consonants, the obstruents [q, qʷ, qχʼ, qχʼʷ, χ, χʷ] are all uvular while the approximants [ʕ, ʕʷ, ʕʼ, ʕʼʷ] are all pharyngeal.

Vowels

St'at'imcets has 6 vowels:

• The phonetic realization of the phonemes are indicated in brackets to the right.
• All retracted vowels are indicated by a line under the vowel. These retracted vowels alternate morphophemically. (Note that St'at'imcets also has retracted consonants.)
• The non-retracted vowel /a/ ranges from [ɛ~æ]. Since retracted /e̱/ and non-retracted /a/ can both pronounced [ɛ], there is often phonetic overlap.

Phonotactics of roots

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)

Orthography

The following table shows the vowels and consonants and their respective orthographic symbols.

Phonological processes

• epenthetic /ə/.

Post-velar Harmony (retraction):

• Within roots, there is a restriction that all consonant and vowel retracted-nonretracted pairs must be of the same type. That is, a root may not contain both a retracted and a nonretracted vowel or consonant. This is a type of Retraced Tongue Root harmony (also called pharyngeal harmony) involving both vowels and consonants that is an areal feature of this region of North America, shared by other Interior Salishan and non-Salishan languages (for example see Chilcotin vowel flattening).

• In addition to the root harmony restriction, some suffixes harmonize with the root to which they are attached. For instance, the inchoative suffix /-ɣʷélʼx/ -gwil’c:

ama "good"	/ʔáma/	+ /-ɣʷélʼx/	→	/ʔamaɣʷélʼx/ [ʔɛmɛɣʷél̰x]	amagwil’c  "to get better"
qaoḻ "bad"	/qá̱ḻ/	+ /-ɣʷél’x/	→	/qa̱ḻɣʷé̱ḻʼx/ [qaɫɣʷɛ́ɫ̰x]	qaoḻgwiiḻ’c  "to get spoiled"

Grammar

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)

St'at'imcets has two main types of words:

1. full words
   1. variable words
   2. invariable words
2. clitics
   1. proclitics
   2. enclitics

The variable word type may be affected by many morphological processes, such as prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and glottalization.

• question of category of noun

Reduplication

St’át’imcets, as is typical of the Salishan family, has several types of reduplication (and triplication) that have a range of functions such as expressing plural, diminutive, aspect, etc.

A more complicated type of reduplication is the internal reduplication used to express the diminutive. In this case the consonant before a stressed vowel is reduplicated after the stressed vowel and usually the vowel then changes to e (IPA: [ə]). Examples are below:

More than one reduplicative process can occur in a given word:

St’át’imcets has several other variants of the above types. Reduplication is further complicated by consonant glottalization (see van Eijk (1997) for details).

Text

The following is a portion of a story in van Eijk (1981:87) told by Rosie Joseph of Mount Currie.

St'at'imcets:

Nilh aylh lts7a sMáma ti húz̓a qweqwl’el’tmínan. N̓as ku7 ámlec áku7 tsípunsa. Nilh t’u7 st’áksas ti xláka7sa. Tsicw áku7, nilh t’u7 ses wa7, kwánas et7ú i sqáwtsa. Wa7 ku7 t’u7 áti7 xílem, t’ak ku7 knáti7 ti pú7y̓acwa. Nilh ku7 t’u7 skwánas, lip̓in̓ás ku7. Nilh ku7 t’u7 aylh stsuts: "Wa7 nalh aylh láti7 kapv́ta!" Nilh ku7 t’u7 aylh sklhaka7mínas ku7 láti7 ti sqáwtsa cwilhá k̓a, nao7q̓ spawts ti kwanensása...

English translation:

This time it is Máma I am going to talk about. She went that way to get some food from her roothouse. So she took along her bucket. She got there, and she stayed around, taking potatoes. She was doing that, and then a mouse ran by there. So she grabbed it, she squeezed it. So she said: "You get all squashed now!" So she opened her hand and she let go of what turned out to be a potato, it was a rotten potato that she had caught....

References

External links

• Audio sample of spoken Lower St'at'imcets and a few Lil'wat songs
• map of Northwest Coast First Nations (including St'at'imc)
• Bibliography of Materials on the Lillooet Language (YDLI)
• The Lillooet Language (YDLI)
• St'at'imcets - The Lillooet Language
• The St’at’imcets Language (Native Language, Font, & Keyboard)
• USLCES webpages (USLCES webpages)
• Ethnologue: Lillooet

Bibliography

• Frank, Beverley, Rose Whitley, and Jan van Eijk. Nqwaluttenlhkalha English to Statimcets Dictionary. Volume One. 2002. ISBN 189671918X
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com).
• Joseph, Marie. (1979). Cuystwí malh Ucwalmícwts: Ucwalmícwts curriculum for beginners. Mount Currie, B.C.: Ts’zil Publishing House. ISBN 0-920938-00-0.
• Larochell, Martina; van Eijk, Jan P.; & Williams, Lorna. (1981). Cuystwí malh Ucwalmícwts: Lillooet legends and stories. Mount Currie, B.C.: Ts’zil Publishing House. ISBN 0-920938-03-5.
• Lillooet Tribal Council. (1993). Introducing St'at'imcets (Fraser River Dialect): A primer. Lillooet, British Columbia: Lillooet Tribal Council.
• Matthewson, Lisa, and Beverley Frank. When I was small = I wan kwikws : a grammatical analysis of St'át'imc oral narratives. First nations languages. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. ISBN 0774810904
• Poser, William J. (2003). The status of documentation for British Columbia native languages. Yinka Dene Language Institute Technical Report (No. 2). Vanderhoof, British Columbia: Yinka Dene Language Institute. (2003 updated version).
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1981). Cuystwí malh Ucwalmícwts: Teach yourself Lillooet: Ucwalmícwts curriculum for advanced learners. Mount Currie, B.C.: Ts’zil Publishing House. ISBN 0-920938-02-7.
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1985). The Lillooet language: Phonology, morphology, syntax. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam.
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1988). Lillooet forms for 'pretending' and 'acting like'. International Journal of Linguistics, 54, 106-110.
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1990). Intransitivity, transitivity and control in Lillooet Salish. In H. Pinkster & I. Grenee (Eds.), Unity in diversity: Papers presented to Simon C. Dik on his 50th birthday (pp. 47-64). Dordrecht, Holland: Foris.
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1993). CVC reduplication and infixation in Lillooet. In A. Mattina & T. Montler (Eds.), American Indian linguistics and ethnography in honor of Laurence C. Thompson (pp. 317-326). University of Montana occasional papers in linguistics (No. 10). Missoula: University of Montana.
• van Eijk, Jan P. (1997). The Lillooet language: Phonology, morphology, syntax. Vancouver: UBC Press. ISBN 0-7748-0625-7. (Revised version of van Eijk 1985).
• Williams, Lorna; van Eijk, Jan P.; & Turner, Gordon. (1979). Cuystwí malh Ucwalmícwts: Ucwalmícwts curriculum for intermediates. Mount Currie, B.C.: Ts’zil Publishing House. ISBN 0-920938-01-9.