Chemakum (; also written as Chimakum or Chimacum) is an extinct Chimakuan language once spoken by the Chemakum, a Native American group that once lived on western

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...

state's

Olympic Peninsula The Olympic Peninsula is a large arm of land in western Washington that lies across Puget Sound from Seattle, and contains Olympic National Park. It is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, the north by the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and th ...

. It was reasonably closely related to the

Quileute language Quileute , sometimes alternatively anglicized as Quillayute , is an extinct language, and was the last Chimakuan language, spoken natively until the end of the 20th century by Quileute and Makah elders on the western coast of the Olympic penin ...

, the only surviving Chimakuan language. In the 1860s,

Chief Seattle Chief Seattle ( – June 7, 1866) was a Suquamish and Duwamish chief. A leading figure among his people, he pursued a path of accommodation to white settlers, forming a personal relationship with "Doc" Maynard. The city of Seattle, in th ...

and the

Suquamish The Suquamish () are a Lushootseed language, Lushootseed-speaking Native Americans in the United States, Native American people, located in present-day Washington (state), Washington in the United States. They are a southern Coast Salish peopl ...

people killed many of the Chimakum people. In 1890, Franz Boas found out about only three speakers, and they spoke it imperfectly, of whom he managed to gather linguistic data from one, a woman named Louise Webster (her brother was another speaker of the three). Several years later in the 1920s
Manuel J. Andrade
cross-checked some of Boas’ materials with the same speaker. A few

semi-speaker Within the linguistic study of endangered languages, sociolinguists distinguish between different speaker types based on the type of competence they have acquired of the endangered language. Often when a community is gradually shifting away from ...

s continued until the 1940s on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula, between Port Townsend and Hood Canal. The name ''Chemakum'' is an anglicization of the

Salishan 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 ...

name for the Chimakum people, perhaps old

Twana Twana is the collective name for a group of nine Coast Salish peoples in the northern-mid Puget Sound region, most of whom are extinct or are now subsumed into other groups and organized tribes. The Skokomish are the main surviving group and se ...

''čə́mqəm'' (currently ''čə́bqəb'' ).

Phonology

Boas’ original article based on fieldwork with one of the last three native speakers in the summer of 1890 uses the following consonantal symbols: ‹h; k, ʞ, q; u; y; n; t; s, c, t_ç; ts, tc; m, p; l, lʻ; ′› along with ejectivization usually notated by a following ‹!› on stops and affricates, but sometimes also by a following ‹ߴ›. Labio-dorsals and the lateral ejective were analyzed as consonant clusters as the transcription shows. Based on his own description (in a footnote) and words and sentences cited, along with some comparison t
Quileute cognates
the following phonemic inventory can be determined (the plain uvulars were probably pre-uvular and the plain stops and affricates were probably somewhat aspirated as in most languages of the region including Quileute): Transcription isn't fully standardized and some amount of variation is attested. E.g., some instances of ejectives are double-marked with both ‹!› and a following ‹ߴ›. Compare the independent word ‘back’ written ‹ʞ!ߴē′enōkoat› against the corresponding lexical suffix is written ‹-ʞ!ĕnuk›. Similarly, the lexical suffix for ‘hand’ appears as ‹-t!ߴa›. Here, the Quileute cognate ‹-t̓ay› shows that, despite the notation, the sound was probably just an ejective ''t''. Yet another notation for an ejective — simply a following apostrophe — may be found in the word ‹ʞ!ߴautߴátct› ‘bracelet’ if this is indeed cognate to Quileute ‹ḳ̓aḳ̓ʷò·t̓á·yat› ‘bracelet’, and in ‹tcߴālʻa› ‘stone’, cognate to Quileute ‹k̓á·t̓ƚa› ‘stone’. The labio-dorsals were not analyzed as unit consonants by Boas. The audible rounding on them was either marked as a glide, or the rounding was notationally transferred to a neighboring vowel. Consider the following examples: ‹kuē′lʻ› ‘one’ (Quileute ‹wí·ƚ›), ‹lʻa′kua› ‘two’ (Quileute ‹ƚáʔw›), ‹ʞoā′lē› ‘three’ (Quileute ‹ḳʷáʔl›), ‹-kō› ‘canoe (lexical suffix)’ (Quileute ‹-kʷ›), ‹-ʞōs› ‘neck (lexical suffix)’ (Quileute ‹-ḳ̓ʷó·s›), ‹-t_çuʞ› ‘our’ (Quileute ‹-t̓oqʷ›) etc. The meaning of Boas’ ‹t_ç› is not entirely certain. Swadesh, working with Boas’ data half a decade later, decided to interpret ‹t_ç› as /t͡ʃʼ/ — in his notation ‹ч̓› — but it is not clear why, especially considering that /t͡ʃʼ/ is witten differently in ‹tcߴālʻa› ‘stone’. Boas himself describes the sound as “dento-alveolar t”, which isn't very helpful. Based on comparative evidence from Quileute, Powell interprets ‹t_ç› as a variant symbol for /t/ (perhaps notating some allophonic difference that Boas perceived). Swadesh added a distinction between labio-velar and labio-uvular fricatives for which there is no explicit evidence in Boas’ paper yielding the system below: Boas transcribed several distinct vowels in the published account of Chemakum (and a few more in his unpublished fieldnotes): ‹ā, a, ē, e, ĕ, ī, ō›, along with a marginal ‹u› whose main purpose was to indicate rounding adjacent to labio-dorsal consonants. The list was reduced to a much simpler phonemic inventory of three short vowels /i a o/ and three long vowels /iː aː oː/ by Powell. The vowels probably exhibited some amount of allophonic variation as Boas’ original transcription shows, but according to Andrade, less so than in Quileute.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chemakum Language Chimakuan languages Languages of the United States Extinct languages of North America Indigenous languages of Washington (state)

Phonology

See also

References