Tillamook language

Tillamook
Native to United States
Region Northwestern Oregon
Ethnicity Tillamook, Siletz
Extinct 1970[1]
Dialects
Tillamook
Siletz
Language codes
ISO 639-3 til
Glottolog till1254[2]

Tillamook is an extinct Salishan language, formerly spoken by the Tillamook people in northwestern Oregon, United States. The last fluent speaker is believed to have died in the 1970s; between 1965 and 1972, in an effort to prevent the language from being lost, a group of researchers from the University of Hawaii interviewed the few remaining Tillamook-speakers and created a 120-page dictionary.[3]

Phonology

Vowels

Front Back
High i ə
Low æ ɑ

Consonants

Alveolar Postalveolar
/ palatal		 Velar Uvular Glottal
Central Lateral Unrounded Rounded* Unrnd. Rnd.*
Stop t k kʷ q qʷ ʔ
Ejective tʼ kʼ kʷʼ qʼ qʷʼ
Affricate t͡s t͡ʃ
Ejective affricate t͡sʼ t͡ɬʼ t͡ʃʼ
Fricative s ɬ ʃ x xʷ χ χʷ h
Nasal n
Approximant l j w

Internal Rounding

The "rounded" consonants (marked by ʷ), including /w/, are not labialized—the effect is created entirely inside the mouth by cupping the tongue. Uvulars with this distinctive internal rounding have "a kind of ɔ timbre" while "rounded" front velars have ɯ coloring. These contrast and oppose otherwise very similar segments having ɛ or ɪ coloring—the "unrounded" consonants.

/w/ is also formed with this internal rounding instead of true labialization, making it akin to /ɰ/. So are vowel sounds formerly written as /o/ or /u/, which are best characterized as the diphthong /əw/ with increasing rounding.[4]

Notes

  1. ↑ Tillamook at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Tillamook". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. ↑ Official site of Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes
  4. ↑ Thompson & Thompson (1966), p. 316

Bibliography

External links