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Haida Language
Haida (', ', ', ') is the language of the Haida people, spoken in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of Canada and on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. An endangered language, Haida currently has 24 native speakers, though revitalization efforts are underway. At the time of the European arrival at in 1774, it is estimated that Haida speakers numbered about 15,000. Epidemics soon led to a drastic reduction in the Haida population, which became limited to three villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg. Positive attitudes towards assimilation combined with the ban on speaking Haida in residential schools led to a sharp decline in the use of the Haida language among the Haida people, and today almost all ethnic Haida use English to communicate. Classification of the Haida language is a matter of controversy, with some linguists placing it in the Na-Dené language family and others arguing that it is a language isolate. Haida itself is split between Northern and Southern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Columbia
British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, forests, lakes, mountains, inland deserts and grassy plains, and borders the province of Alberta to the east and the Yukon and Northwest Territories to the north. With an estimated population of 5.3million as of 2022, it is Canada's third-most populous province. The capital of British Columbia is Victoria and its largest city is Vancouver. Vancouver is the third-largest metropolitan area in Canada; the 2021 census recorded 2.6million people in Metro Vancouver. The first known human inhabitants of the area settled in British Columbia at least 10,000 years ago. Such groups include the Coast Salish, Tsilhqotʼin, and Haida peoples, among many others. One of the earliest British settlements in the area was Fort Victoria, established ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Masset, British Columbia
Masset , formerly ''Massett'', is a village in Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, Canada. It is located on Masset Sound on the northern coast of Graham Island, the largest island in the archipelago, and is approximately west of mainland British Columbia. It is the primary western terminus of Trans-Canada Highway 16 (the Yellowhead Highway) and is served by Masset Airport, with flights to Vancouver and Prince Rupert. During the maritime fur trade of the early 19th century, Masset was a key trading site. It was incorporated as a village municipality on May 11, 1961. Name The name Masset was a gift from the captain of a Spanish vessel that was repaired with the assistance of the Haida citizens of Atewaas, Kayung and Jaaguhl. These three villages accepted the gift and adopted the name Masset to commemorate what might be the first ever contact between Europeans and the Haida. During the early years of Canadian colonization the name Masset and the post office were adopted by the for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation (linguistics), intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with ''phoneme''. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. Tonal languages are different from Pitch-accent language, pitch-accent languages in that tonal languages can have each syllable with an independent tone whilst pitch-accent languages may have one syllable in a word or morpheme that is more prominent than the others. Mechanics Mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel Length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in: Arabic, Estonian, Finnish, Fijian, Kannada, Malayalam, Japanese, Latin, Old English, Scottish Gaelic, and Vietnamese. While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of English, it is said to do so in a few dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, meaning that vowel length does not change meaning, and the length of a vowel is conditioned by other factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it, for instance whether the vowel is followed by a voiced or a voiceless conso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sonorant
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are nasals like and , liquids like and , and semivowels like and . This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents ( stops, affricates and fricatives). For some authors, only the term ''resonant'' is used with this broader meaning, while ''sonorant'' is restricted to consonants, referring to nasals and liquids but not vocoids (vowels and semivowels). Types Whereas obstruents are frequently voiceless, sonorants are almost always voiced. A typical sonorant consonant inventory found in many languages comprises the following: two nasals , two semivowels , and two liquids . In the sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than fricatives are sonorants. They can therefore form the nucleus of a syllable in languages that place ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glottalic Consonant
In phonetics, a glottalic consonant is a consonant produced with some important contribution (movement or closure) of the glottis. Glottalic sounds may involve motion of the larynx upward or downward, as the initiator of an egressive or ingressive glottalic airstream mechanism respectively. An egressive glottalic airstream produces '' ejective consonants'', while an ingressive glottalic airstream produces ''implosive consonants''. Ejectives are almost always voiceless stops (plosives) or affricates, while implosives are almost always voiced stops. However, when a sound is said to be ''glottalized'', this is often not what is meant. Rather, glottalization usually means that a normal pulmonic airstream is partially or completely interrupted by closure of the glottis. Sonorants (including vowels) may be glottalized in this fashion. There are two ways this is represented in the IPA: (a) the same way as ejectives, with an apostrophe; or, (b) more properly with a superscript glottal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ejective Consonant
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives. Description In producing an ejective, the stylohyoid muscle and digastric muscle contract, causing the hyoid bone and the connected glottis to raise, and the forward articulation (at the velum in the case of ) is held, raising air pressure greatly in the mouth so when the oral articulators separate, there is a dramatic burst of air. The Adam's apple may be seen moving when the sound is pronounced. In the languages in which they are more obvious, ejectives are often des ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wakashan Languages
Wakashan is a family of languages spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, and in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As is typical of the Northwest Coast, Wakashan languages have large consonant inventories—the consonants often occurring in complex clusters. Classification Family division The Wakashan language family consists of seven languages: I. Northern Wakashan (Kwakiutlan) languages : 1. Haisla (also known as Xaʼislak'ala, X̌àh̓isl̩ak̓ala or Haisla-Henaksiala, with two dialects, spoken by the Haisla) – about 200 speakers (2005) ::* C̓imo'c̓a/Cʼimaucʼa (Kitimaat/Kitamat) - X̄a'islak̓ala dialect (spoken by the Haisla/x̣àʼisəla) ::* Gitlo'p (Kitlope) - X̄enaksialak̓ala dialect (spoken by the Henaaksiala/X̄enaksiala) : 2. Kwak'wala (also known as Kwakiutl and Lekwala / Liq̓ʷala, with four dialects, spoken by and Kwakwaka'wakw or Northern Kwakiu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salishan Languages
The Salishan (also Salish) languages are a family of languages of the Pacific Northwest in North America (the Canadian province of British Columbia and the American states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana). They are characterised by agglutinativity and syllabic consonants. For instance the Nuxalk word ''clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’'' (), meaning "he had had n his possessiona bunchberry plant", has thirteen obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels. The Salishan languages are a geographically contiguous block, with the exception of the Nuxalk (Bella Coola), in the Central Coast of British Columbia, and the extinct Tillamook language, to the south on the central coast of Oregon. The terms ''Salish'' and ''Salishan'' are used interchangeably by linguists and anthropologists studying Salishan, but this is confusing in regular English usage. The name ''Salish'' or ''Selisch'' is the endonym of the Flathead Nation. Linguists later applied the name S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pharyngeal Consonant
A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, from (ary)epiglottal consonants, or "low" pharyngeals, which are articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis at the entrance of the larynx, as well as from epiglotto-pharyngeal consonants, with both movements being combined. Stops and trills can be reliably produced only at the epiglottis, and fricatives can be reliably produced only in the upper pharynx. When they are treated as distinct places of articulation, the term ''radical consonant'' may be used as a cover term, or the term ''guttural consonants'' may be used instead. In many languages, pharyngeal consonants trigger advancement of neighboring vowels. Pharyngeals thus differ from uvulars, which nearly always trigger retraction. For example, in some dialects of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language Isolate
Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The number of language isolates is unknown. A language isolate is unrelated to any other, which makes it the only language in its own language family. It is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationships—one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. One explanation for the existence of language isolates is that they might be the last remaining branch of a larger language family. The language possibly had relatives in the past which have since disappeared without being documented. Another explanation for language isolates is that they developed in isolation from other languages. This explanation mostly applies to sign languages that have arisen independently ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Na-Dené Languages
Na-Dene (; also Nadene, Na-Dené, Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit, Tlina–Dene) is a family of Native American languages that includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit languages. Haida was formerly included, but is now considered doubtful. By far the most widely spoken Na-Dene language today is Navajo. In February 2008, a proposal connecting Na-Dene (excluding Haida) to the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia into a Dené–Yeniseian family was published and well-received by a number of linguists.Dene–Yeniseic Symposium , University of Alaska Fairbanks, February 2008, accessed 30 Mar 2010 It was proposed in a 2014 paper that the Na-Dene languages of North America and the Yeniseian languages of Siberia had a common origin in a language spoken in |
