Chimakuan Language

The Chimakuan languages are a group of extinct languages that were spoken in northwestern Washington state, United States, on the Olympic Peninsula. They were spoken by Chimakum, Quileute and Hoh tribes. They are part of the Mosan sprachbund, and one of its languages is famous for having no nasal consonants. The two languages were about as close as English and German. Due to proximity, the Chimakum languages are also similar to Wakashan languages.

Family division

* Chemakum (also known as Chimakum or Chimacum) ''(†)''
* Quileute (also known as Quillayute) ''(†)''

Chemakum is now extinct. It was spoken until the 1940s on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula between Port Townsend and Hood Canal. The name Chemakum is an Anglicized version of a Salishan word for the Chimakum people, such as the nearby Twana word ''čə́bqəb'' (earlier ).

Quileute is now extinct. During the late 20th and early 21st centuries a revitalization effort began, and it is today spoken as a second language by a relatively small amount of the Quileute tribe on the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula, south of Cape Flattery. The name Quileute comes from ''kʷoʔlí·yot , the name of a village at La Push.

Phonology

The Chimakuan languages have phonemic inventories similar to other languages of the Mosan sprachbund, with three vowels, ejective consonants, uvular consonants, and lateral affricates. However, both languages have typological oddities: Chemakum had no simple velar consonants, and Quileute has no nasal consonants.

Proto-Chimakuan

The (pre-)Proto-Chimakuan sound system contained three vowels, long and short, and lexical stress. It had the following consonants.

In Proto-Chimakuan the series occurred (mostly?) before the vowel . On the other hand, occurred (mostly?) before the vowels . These series may have become separate phonemes before Chimakum and Quileute split, but if so, it seems clear that they had been allophones not long before then.

In Quileute the stress became fixed to the penultimate syllable, though subsequent changes made it somewhat unpredictable, and the glottalized sonorants became allophonic with glottal stop-sonorant sequences and so can no longer be considered phonemic. Open syllables developed long vowels. Perhaps as recently as the late 19th century, the nasals became voiced plosives .

In Chemakum, stressed vowels frequently acquired glottal stops; depalatalized to , while palatalized to ; sonorants lost their glottalization; and the approximants hardened to in the environment of stressed vowels.

Morphology

There are more than 20 known common inflectional suffixed and about 200 derivational suffixes. No common prefixes are known. In some cases, infixes are used in both languages.

Lexicon

Below is a table listing numerals from 1 to 10 in Chemakum and Quileute:

References

Bibliography

* Andrade, Manuel J. (1933). ''Quileute''. New York: Columbia University Press. (Extract from ''Handbook of American Indian Languages'' (Vol. 3, pp. 151–292); Andrade's doctoral dissertation).
* Andrade, Manuel J. (1953). Notes on the relations between Chemakum and Quileute. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''19'', 212–215.
* Andrade, Manuel J.; & Frachtenberg, Leo J. (1931). ''Quileute texts''. Columbia University contributions to anthropology (Vol. 12). New York: Columbia University Press.
* Boas, Franz. (1892). Notes on the Chemakum language. ''American Anthropologist'', ''5'', 37–44.
* Campbell, Lyle. (1997). ''American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America''. New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chimakuan Languages

Language families
Mosan languages
Endangered Chimakuan languages