| Ditidaht | |
|---|---|
| Nitinaht | |
| Spoken in | Canada |
| Region | Southern part of Vancouver Island, British Columbia |
| Native speakers | 8 (date missing) |
| Language family |
Wakashan
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | dtd |
Ditidaht (also Nitinaht, Nitinat, Southern Nootkan) is a South Wakashan (Nootkan) language spoken on the southern part of Vancouver Island. Nitinaht is related to the other South Wakashan languages, Makah and the neighboring Nuu-chah-nulth.
The number of Ditidaht speakers dwindled from about thirty in the 1990s[1] to just eight by 2006.[2] In 2003 the Ditidaht council approved construction of a $4.2 million Ditidaht Community School to teach students on the Ditidaht (Malachan) reserve their language and culture from kindergarten to Grade 12. The program was successful in its first years and produced its first high-school graduate in 2005.[2]
As of July 2006, British linguistics professor Michael Fortescue has been living on the reserve, helping to complete a 500-page Ditidaht and Wakashan dictionary. The language existed only orally prior to 2002, but it now has a 53-character alphabet. New terminology is being developed to adapt the language to modern technology and life. The Ditidaht have begun publishing the language to CD, DVD, and on FirstVoices.ca.[2]
The reason for the unusual discrepancy in the names Nitinaht and Ditidaht is that when the Ditidaht people were first contacted by Europeans, they had nasal consonants (/m/, /n/) in their language. Their autonym of Nitinaht was what the Europeans recorded for them and their language. Soon afterward the consonants shifted to voiced plosives (/b/, /d/) as part of an areal trend, so the people came to call themselves Ditidaht. Ditidaht is thus one of only a handful of languages in the world that do not have nasal consonants.