Kwak'wala

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Kwak'wala (also Kwagiutl or Kwakiutl) is the Indigenous language spoken by the Kwakwaka'wakw. It belongs to the Wakashan language family. There are about 250 Kwak'wala speakers today, which amounts to 5% of the Kwakwaka'wakw population. Because of the small number of speakers, and the fact that very few children learn Kwak'wala as a first language, its long-term viability is in question. However, interest from many Kwakwaka'wakw in preserving their language and a number of revitalization projects are countervailing pressures which may extend the viability of the language.

[edit] Dialects

The ethnonym Kwakwaka'wakw literally means "speakers of Kwak'wala", effectively defining an ethnic connection by reference to a shared language. However, the Kwak'wala spoken by each of the surviving tribes with Kwak'wala speakers exhibits dialectical differences from that spoken by other tribes. There are four major dialects which are unambiguously dialects of Kwak'wala: Kwak̓wala, ’Nak̓wala, G̱uc̓ala and T̓łat̓łasik̓wala.^[1]

In addition to these dialects, there are also Kwakwaka'wakw tribes that speak Liq'wala. Liq'wala has sometimes been considered to be a dialect of Kwak'wala, and sometimes a separate language. The standard orthography for Liq'wala is quite different from the most widely-used orthography for Kwak'wala, which tends to widen the apparent differences between Liq'wala and Kwak'wala.

[edit] Structure

[edit] Phonology

In terms of its phonemic inventory, Kwak'wala shares some properties common to other languages in its region (including related Wakashan languages as well as languages from other families, such as Salishan languages). Relative to other languages of the world, Kwak'wala is notable for its rich inventory of consonants.

The vowels of Kwak'wala are a, e, i, o, u, ɘ. 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. This is especially evident in the case of a and ɘ. These vowels often interchange in different instances of the same stem or suffix, depending on the phonological content. This area in general is not well understood.

Kwak'wala has a three-way contrast in consonants (plain (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.

Stress placement depends on syllable weight. 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, pɘn is a heavy syllable, while pɘd is light. If a word has any heavy syllables, then primary stress falls on the leftmost heavy syllable. Otherwise, primary stress falls on the rightmost syllable. Secondary stress also occurs, but its distribution is poorly understood.

Kwak'wala 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 word-internal. Glottalized consonants surface faithfully when word-final, but also surface with a following epenthetic vowel when word-internal. (Davenport 2006)

[edit] Morphology

Kwak'wala has a rich morphological system which, like other Wakashan languages, is entirely suffixing. 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. The suffixes can be simplistically divided into two classes: derivational suffixes and inflectional suffixes. Derivational suffixes tend to have very specific lexical meanings, such as, -am’ala "to quarrel about (something)"; =xs "in a canoe". These suffixes do not form a paradigm. Inflectional suffixes tend to have general grammatical functions: for example, =oləm "(nominalizer)"; =kʷ "(passivizer)". They also form natural paradigms.

Suffixes can also be divided into different classes depending on their morphophonological behavior. These classes are neutral, weakening, and strengthening. (This article follows the Boasian orthography of indicating suffix type by preceding the suffix with '-', '=' or '-!', respectively.) When attached to a stem, weakening suffixes turn a stem-final ejective consonant into a voiceless consonant, and a voiceless consonant into a voiced consonant. Strengthening suffixes have the opposite effect. Weakening and strengthening suffixes must be further divided into those that affect all consonants, and those that affect only stops. (There a number of complications and further details in this process.) Another distinctive aspect of the morphophonology of Kwak'wala is the existence of many different patterns of reduplication, indicating (usually) different kinds of plural of distributive meanings.

Derivational morphology

The suffixes in Kwak'wala can be grouped into at least 19 different classes, on semantic grounds. (Boas 1947, p. 237) At least seven of these classes consist mostly or entirely of derivational suffixes:

General locatives: e.g. =axʲsa "away" (maːxʦ’axʲsa "to go away for shame"); =ʔdzo "on a flat object" (ʔaleːwədzəweʔ "sea hunter on flat, i.e. Orion").

Special locatives: e.g. -ʔsto "round opening, eye, door" (t​͡ɬeːχ’ʷsto "to miss a round place"); =is "open space, bottom of sea, world, beach, in body" (m^ʔɘgʷiːs "round thing in stomach").

Special locatives referring to body parts: e.g. -!pɘla "throat" (teːk’ʷɘpɘla "to have hanging on chest"); -!eq "in mind" (n^ʔeːn^ʔk’ʲeχ’id "to begin to say in mind").

Transitive verb markers: e.g. -a, which turns a static or intransitive verb or a noun into a transitive verb: cf. ʔamχ "water-tight" and ʔamχa "to make water-tight"; and jaːsekʷ "tallow" and jaːsekʷa "to put tallow on".

Nominalizing suffixes: e.g. -!ənχ "season" (xʲaːm^ʔaənχ "season of scarcity of food"); =id "the one by whom one is owned as" (q’aːgʷid "master (i.e. the one by whom one is owned as a slave)").

Verbalizing suffixes: e.g. =alisɘm "to die of inner troubles" (xʷɘljalisɘm "to die of longing"); -boɬa "to pretend" (q’ʷaːsaboɬa "to pretend to cry").

Adverbal/adjectival suffixes: e.g. -kʲas "real, really" (nɘnwalak’ʷenekʲasos "your real supernatural power"); -dze "large" (q’aːsadzekʲas "a great number of sea otters").

Inflectional morphology

There are two major types of inflectional suffixes in Kwak'wala: verbal suffixes that modify a predicate; and nominal clitics, which may agree with a noun present in the sentence, or may be entirely pronominal.

Verbal inflection:

More Boasian classes: aspect, mood, evidentiality, epistemic modality, polarity, telicity, speaker's emotional attitude.

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

A typologically notable feature of Kwak'wala 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 not. The verb paradigm for la "to go" (classified as a Paradigm 2 verb) illustrates these properties (Boas 1947, p. 261):

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, then a pronominal clitic will be used. Clitics always precede the nominal with which they agree, which violates the generalization that Kwak'wala affixes are always suffixing. However, the clitic always forms a phonological word 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. (Note that 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.)

(NB: In the preceding table, forms with a first person object do not use a verbal suffix. Rather, they use a periphrastic auxiliary form of the verb gʲaχ "to come". This auxiliary precedes the main verb in the sentence.)

Suffixation is also used for genitive 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 -s is added to the prenominal genitive marker, and the possessed noun take the postnominal demonstrative genitive ending. In the latter case, the instrumental -s attaches to the postnominal genitive ending on the possessed noun, and the prenominal sufix remains unchanged. (Boas 1947, p. 254)

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 -χ or s respectively.

Independent pronouns also exist in Kwak'wala. 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:

Note that the object forms are clearly related to gaχ "to come" (in the first person) and la "to go" (in the second and third person).

[edit] Syntax

Kwak'wala 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 k’ʷas’ "sit" is a verb; combined with an article-like particle, it serves as a noun: jəχa k’ʷas’ "the one who sits" (Boas 1947).

A minimal sentence consists of a predicate. Although this is syntactically simple, it is not necessarily semantically impoverished. The rich morphological system of Kwak'wala allows the expression of many features in a single predicate: for example, ɢaɢak’ʲənt​͡ɬot​͡ɬ "I shall try to get you to be my wife"; ɬawadənt​͡ɬasəkʲ "I have this one for my husband (lit. I am husband owner of him)" (Boas 1947, p. 281).

In sentences with greater syntactic complexity, word-order is identical to the order in which inflectional morphemes are added to a stem, namely: stem/predicate - subject - direct object - instrument - indirect object. Thus:

A number of clitics are used to mark agreement with nouns, including clitics for definiteness/deixis and case (including accusative and instrumental case). 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.

This can be seen in the preceding example: the sentence-initial predicate kʷixideda includes a clitic /-ida/ which belongs together with the nominal bəgʷanəmaχa in terms of syntactical constituency. That nominal in turns includes a clitic /-χa/ which is syntactically connected to the following noun, and so on.

[edit] Orthography

Word lists and some documentation of Kwak'wala were created from the early period of contact with Europeans in the 18th century, but a systematic attempt to record the language did not occur before the work of Franz Boas in the late 19th and early 20th century.^{[citation needed]} Over time, Boas developed a systematic orthography for documentation of Kwak'wala, 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 Kwak'wala, it was difficult for Kwak'wala 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 than English orthography, which was familiar to many Kwakwaka'wakw. A practical orthography, developed by the Kwakwaka'wakw linguist David Grubb, became the standard system for writing Kwak'wala.

Practical writing of Kwak'wala today is typically done in the orthography promoted by the U'mista 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 Kwak'wala typically use an IPA or Americanist transcription.

The following table compares different orthographic representations of some Kwak'wala words.

(NB: g. in the Boasian transcription should be an underdotted g rather than a digraph. ḵ’, etc., in the U'mista transcription should be overstricken rather than written as digraphs.)

[edit] History and current status

The use of Kwak'wala declined significantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to the assimilationist policies of the Canadian government, and above all the mandatory attendance of Kwakwa'wakw children at residential schools. Although Kwak'wala and Kwakwaka'wakw culture have been well-studied by linguists and anthropologists, these 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 Kwakwaka'wakw had nothing to say." ^[3] As a result of these pressures, there are relatively few Kwak'wala 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.^[4]

However, a number of revitalization efforts have recently attempted to reverse language loss for Kwak'wala. A proposal to build a Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations Centre for Language Culture has gained wide support.^[5] A review of revitalization efforts in the 1990s shows that the potential to fully revitalize Kwak'wala still remains, but serious hurdles also exist.^[6]

[edit] References

1. ^ Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw/Kʷakʷəkəw̓akʷ Communities
2. ^ ^{a b c} The presence of an underlying vowel in these forms is uncertain.
3. ^ SFU News Online - Native language centre planned - July 07, 2005
4. ^ Stabilizing Indigenous Languages: Conclusion
5. ^ SFU News Online - Native language centre planned - July 07, 2005
6. ^ http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/%7Ejar/RIL_4.html Reversing Language Shift: Can Kwak'wala Be Revived?

[edit] Bibliography

• Anderson, Stephen (1984). "Kwakwala syntax and the government-binding theory". Syntax and Semantics 16. 
• Boas, Franz (1893). "Vocabulary of the Kwakiutl language". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 31 (140): 34–82. 
• Boas, Franz (1900). "Sketch of the Kwakiutl language". American Anthropologist 2 (4): 708–721. doi:10.1525/aa.1900.2.4.02a00080. 
• Boas, Franz (1924). "A revised list of Kwakiutl suffixes". International Journal of American Linguistics 3 (1): 117–131. doi:10.1086/463753. 
• Boas, Franz (1931). "Notes on the Kwakiutl vocabulary". International Journal of American Linguistics 6 (3/4): 163–178. doi:10.1086/463790. 
• Boas, Franz (1932). "Notes on some recent changes in the Kwakiutl language". International Journal of American Linguistics 7 (1/2): 90–93. doi:10.1086/463797. 
• Boas, Franz (1947). "Grammar of Kwakiutl (With a Glossary of the Suffixes)". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 37 (3): 201–377. doi:10.2307/1005538. 
• Davenport, Tristan (2006). Alternations in Place and Laryngeality: On the Coda Condition of Kwakw’ala. Manuscript: University of California, Santa Cruz. 
• Grubb, David (1969). A Kwakiutl phonology. MA thesis: University of Victoria. 
• Grubb, David (1977). A Practical Writing System and Short Dictionary of Kwakw'ala (Kwakiutl). Ottawa: National Museum of Man. 

[edit] Links

• Ethnologue report for language code:kwk
• Kwak'wala lessons for kids
• Northwest Coast keyboard maps
• Reversing Language Shift: Can Kwak'wala Be Revived?

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