The Chimakuan languages are a group of extinct languages that were spoken in northwestern

Washington state Washington, officially the State of Washington, is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is often referred to as Washington State to distinguish it from the national capital, both named after George Washington ...

, United States, on the

Olympic Peninsula The Olympic Peninsula is a large peninsula 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 the ...

. They were spoken by Chimakum,

Quileute The Quileute () are a Native American people in western Washington state in the United States, with 808 enrolled citizens in 2018. They are a federally recognized tribe: the ''Quileute Tribe of the Quileute Reservation''. The Quileute people ...

and Hoh tribes. They are part of the Mosan

sprachbund A sprachbund (, from , 'language federation'), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. Th ...

, and one of its languages, Quileute, is famous for having no

nasal consonants In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...

. The two languages were about as close as English and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

. Due to proximity, the Chimakuan languages are also similar to

Wakashan 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 Nor ...

Family division

* Chimakuan ** Chemakum (also known as Chimakum or Chimacum) **

(also known as Quillayute) At one point, the Chimakuan languages were most likely distributed throughout what is now

Western Washington Western Washington is a region of the United States defined as the area of Washington State west of the Cascade Mountains. This region is home to the state's largest city, Seattle, the state capital, Olympia, and most of the state's residents. ...

, before retreating to the Olympic Peninsula after the expansion of the Coast Salish people. A 1877 report by George Gibbs claimed that he had been told that the Chimakuan people had at one point inhabited the upper portions of the

Nisqually Nisqually, Niskwalli, or Nisqualli may refer to: People * Nisqually people, a Coast Salish ethnic group * Nisqually Indian Tribe of the Nisqually Reservation, federally recognized tribe ** Nisqually Indian Reservation, the tribe's reservation in ...

and Cowlitz Rivers. Additionally, Quileute oral history suggests that Chimakum and Quileute once neighbored each other. Chemakum is now

extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...

. It was spoken until the 1940s on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula between Port Townsend and

Hood Canal Hood Canal is a fjord-like body of water that lies south of Admiralty Inlet in Washington State that some consider to be the western lobe and one of the five main basins of Puget Sound.Salishan word for the Chimakum people, such as the nearby Twana word ''čə́bqəb'' (earlier ). Quileute is also 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 La Push is a small unincorporated area, unincorporated community situated at the mouth of the Quillayute River in the Western Olympic Peninsula. It is the de facto capital and main population center of the Quileute Indian Reservation, which is ho ...

Phonology

The Chimakuan languages have phonemic inventories similar to other languages of the region, with few vowels,

ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a Airstream mechanism#Glottalic initiation, glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with Aspirat ...

uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not ...

s, and lateral affricates. However, both languages have typological oddities—Chemakum had no simple

velar consonant Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relativel ...

s, and Quileute has no

—because of regular sound changes in these languages.

Proto-Chimakuan

The Proto-Chimakuan sound system, as reconstructed by Powell, contained three vowels, long and short, and lexical stress (accompanied by a higher pitch as in English). It had the consonants listed in the following table. In angle brackets following each IPA symbol are Powell's own (Americanist) notation, which shall be used henceforth instead of the IPA. The plain voiceless stops and affricates were probably mildly aspirated as in modern Quileute. The Proto-Chimakuan palato-alveolar fricative and affricates *''š'', *''č'', *''č̓'' developed as positional allophones of Pre-Proto-Chimakuan *''xʷ'', *''kʷ'', *''k̓ʷ'' before the front vowel *''i''. This is why the Quileute and Chemakum reflexes of Proto-Chimakuan *''xʷ'', *''kʷ'', *''k̓ʷ'' and *''š'', *''č'', *''č̓'' are largely in complementary distribution, though they are clearly phonemized in the modern languages (and probably already was in Late Proto-Chimakuan before it split) owing to loans and some irregular and analogical developments, especially in Chemakum. Note that the palatalization and delabialization of Pre-Proto-Chimakuan *''xʷ'', *''kʷ'', *''k̓ʷ'' did not cause a merger with *''x'', *''k'', *''k̓'' at any point. The regular reflexes of the Proto-Chimakuan consonant phonemes in the attested Chimakuan languages are tabled below. Where the official Quileute orthography or Boas' Chemakum transcription differ from the Proto-Chimakuan transcription (on whose IPA values, cf. table above), the orthographical representations have been given in angle brackets. Glottalized resonants, common in neighboring language families like Salishan, do not occur in either daughter language synchronically, but they must be reconstructed to account for some seemingly irregular correspondences between the languages with respect to occurrences of a glottal stop before resonant-reflexes, as well as language-internal evidence showing presence and absence of glottal stops around resonants in various related morphological forms, cf. Powell (1974) for more details. Apart from the loss of glottalized resonants, Quileute has more-or-less kept the Proto-Chimakuan phonemic inventory unaltered. The only major change (sub-phonemic) is the infamous denasalization of *''m'' (*''m̓'') and *''n'' (*''n̓'') to (''ʔ'')''b'' and (''ʔ'')''d'', respectively, ridding the language of nasal consonants except in certain archaïcizing narrative registers. Quileute also acquired the (presently rare) phonemes ''ƛ'' and ''g'' which occur primarily in loans but also a few words and morphemes of uncertain origin (and in the case of ''ƛ'', phonemization of the biconsonantal sequence *''t‿ƚ''). The development of Chemakum, on the other hand, has seen more significant changes. The Proto-Chimakuan palato-alveolar sibilants *''š'', *''č'', *''č̓'' were fronted and merged with the alveolar sibilants *''s'', *''c'', *''c̓''. Thereäfter the plain velars *''x'', *''k'', *''k̓'' were palatalized and affricated to ''š'', ''č'', ''č̓''. The Proto-Chimakuan glides *''y'', *''y̓'', *''w'', *''w̓'' were subsequently (or concurrently) hardened to (''ʔ'')''č'' and (''ʔ'')''kʷ'' causing mergers (a few instances of the glides survive without hardening in Chimakum, e.g., in a demonstrative). A sub-table from the table above is reproduced below to illustrate these mergers more clearly. All of these developments have parallels in neighboring Salishan languages. As an illustrative example, consider Chemakum ''čā́ʔᵃčis'' , Quileute ''káʔyis'' 'aunt' < Proto-Chimakuan *''káy̓is''. The vocalic system of Proto-Chimakuan is much harder to reconstruct as Boas' Chemakum data don't allow for an unambiguous reading of the phonemic vowels in that language. However, assuming a Quileute-like 3-vowel system with an extra parameter of vowel length, Powel was able to reconstruct a similar provisional vocalic inventory for the proto-language: short *''a'', *''e'', *''o'', and long *''a·'', *''e·'', *''o·''. Stress was phonemic. In Quileute, the stress became fixed to the penultimate syllable, though subsequent changes made it somewhat unpredictable. Open syllables developed long 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. Only 1 through 4 and 6 are cognate, the rest being independently innovated in the two languages.

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); . * Powell, James V. (1974). ''Proto-Chimakuan: Materials for a Reconstruction''. Working Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 7, № 2), Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaiʻi. {{DEFAULTSORT:Chimakuan Languages Language families Mosan languages Endangered Chimakuan languages