Lillooet language
Lillooet , known in the language itself as ' / ' (), is the language of the St’át’imc, a Salishan language of the Interior branch spoken in southern British Columbia, Canada, around the middle Fraser and Lillooet Rivers. The language of the Lower Lillooet people uses the name ', because ' means "the language of the people of "Sat̓"", i.e. the Upper Lillooet of the Fraser River. Lillooet 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. St̓át̓imcets has two main dialects: Upper St̓át̓imcets is spoken around Fountain, Pavilion , Lillooet, and neighboring areas. Lower St̓át̓imcets is spoken around Mount Currie and neighboring areas. An additional subdialect called Skookumchuck is spoken within the Lower St̓át̓imcets dialect area, but there is no information available in van Eijk (1981, 1997) (which are the main references for this article). A common usage used by the bands of the Lower Lillooet River below Lillooet Lake is "Ucwalmicwts". The "Clao7alcw" (Raven's Nest) language nest program at Mount Currie, home of the Lil’wat, is conducted in the Lil̓wat language and was the focus of Onowa McIvor's Master's thesis. As of 2014, "the Coastal  Corridor Consortium— an entity made up of board members from First Nations and educational partners to improve aboriginal access to and performance in postsecondary education and training— ... [has] developed a Lil’wat-language program." Phonology. Consonants. St̓át̓imcets has 44 consonants: Vowels. St'at'imcets has 8 vowels: Phonological processes. Post-velar Harmony (retraction): Orthography. There are two orthographies, one based on Americanist Phonetic Notation that was developed by the Mount Currie School and used by the Lillooet Council, and a modification by Bouchard that is used by the Upper St̓át̓imc Language, Culture and Education Society. The latter orthography is unusual in that is  written . Grammar. St'at'imcets has two main types of words: The variable word type may be affected by many morphological processes, such as prefixation, suffixation, infixation, reduplication, and glottalization. St̓át̓imcets, like the other Salishan languages, exhibits predicate/argument flexibility. All full words are able to occur in the predicate (including words with typically 'nouny' meanings such as nk̓yap 'coyote', which in the predicate essentially means 'to be a coyote') and any full word is able to appear in an argument, even those that seem "verby", such as t̓ak 'go along', which as a noun, is equivalent the noun phrase 'one that  goes along'. Reduplication. St̓át̓imcets, 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: ). 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). Mood and modality. The subjunctive mood appears in nine distinct environments, with a range of semantic effects, including: The St̓át̓imcets subjunctive also differs from Indo-European subjunctives in that it is not selected by attitude verbs. St̓át̓imcets has a complex system of subject and object agreement. There are different subject agreement paradigms for transitive vs. intransitive predicates. For intransitive predicates, there are three distinct subject paradigms, one of which is glossed as 'subjunctive' by van Eijk (1997) and Davis (2006) Sample text. The following is a portion of a story in van Eijk (1981:87 ) told by Rosie Joseph of Mount Currie. St̓át̓imcets: Nilh aylh lts7a sMáma ti húz̓a qweqwl̓el̓tmínan. N̓as ku7 ámlec áku7 tsípunsa. Nilh t̓u7 st̓áksas ti xláka7sa. Tsicw áku7, nilh t̓u7 ses wa7, kwánas et7ú i sqáwtsa. Wa7 ku7 t̓u7 áti7 xílem, t̓ak ku7 knáti7 ti pú7y̓acwa. Nilh ku7 t̓u7 skwánas, lip̓in̓ás ku7. Nilh ku7 t̓u7 aylh stsuts: "Wa7 nalh aylh láti7 kapv́ta!" Nilh ku7 t̓u7 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...