Nuxalk language


Nuxalk, also known as Bella Coola, is a Salishan language spoken by the Nuxalk people. Today it is "an endangered language with fewer than 10 fluent speakers" in the vicinity of the Canadian town of Bella Coola, British Columbia.
While the language is still sometimes called Bella Coola by linguists, the native name Nuxalk is preferred by some, notably by the Nuxalk Nation government.
Though the number of truly fluent speakers has not increased, the language is now taught in both the provincial school system and the Nuxalk Nation's own school, Acwsalcta, which means "a place of learning". Nuxalk language classes, if taken to at least the Grade 11 level, are considered adequate second language qualifications for entry to the major B.C. universities. CKNN-FM Nuxalk Radio is also working to promote the language.

Name

The name "Nuxalk" for the language comes from the native nuxalk , referring to the "Bella Coola Valley." "Bella Coola" is a rendering of the Heiltsuk bḷ́xʷlá'', meaning "stranger".

Geographical distribution

Nowadays, Nuxalk is spoken only in Bella Coola, British Columbia, surrounded by Wakashan- and Athabascan-speaking tribes. It was once spoken in over 100 settlements, with varying dialects, but in the present day most of these settlements have been abandoned and dialectal differences have largely disappeared.

Classification

Nuxalk forms its own subgroup of the Salish language family. Its lexicon is equidistant from Coast and Interior Salish, but it shares phonological and morphological features with Coast Salish. Nuxalk also borrows many words from contiguous North Wakashan languages, as well as some from neighbouring Athabascan languages and Tsimshian.

Phonology

Consonants

Nuxalk has 28 consonants depicted below in IPA and the Americanist orthography of Davis & Saunders when it differs from the IPA.
What are transcribed in the orthography as 'plain' velar consonants are actually palatals, and the sibilants ' palatalize to ' before .

Vowels

FrontCentralBack
Close
Mid
Open

Allophony

may be pronounced:
may be pronounced:
may be pronounced:
In addition to the Americanist orthography of Davis & Saunders used in this article for clarity, Nuxalk also has a non-diacritical Bouchard-type practical orthography that originated in Hank Nater's The Bella Coola Language, and was used in his 1990 Nuxalk-English Dictionary. It continues to be used today at Acwsalcta for Nuxalk language learning, as well as in Nuxalk documents and names. The orthographic variants are summarized below.
PhonemeAmericanistPractical
aa
xc
xʷcw
hh
ii
kk
k̓k'
kʷkw
k̓ʷkw'
ll
łlh
mm
nn
pp
p̓p'
qq
q̓q'
qʷqw
q̓ʷqw'
ss
tt
t̓t'
ƛ̓tl'
cts
c̓ts'
uu
ww
x̣x
x̣ʷxw
yy
ʔ7

Syllables

The notion of syllable is challenged by Nuxalk in that it allows long strings of consonants without any intervening vowel or other sonorant. Salishan languages, and especially Nuxalk, are famous for this. For instance, the following word contains only obstruents:
Other examples are:
There has been some dispute as to how to count the syllables in such words, what, if anything, constitutes the nuclei of those syllables, and if the concept of 'syllable' is even applicable to Nuxalk. However, when recordings are available, the syllable structure can be clearly audible, and speakers have clear conceptions as to how many syllables a word contains. In general, a syllable may be, ,, or. When C is a stop, CF syllables are always composed of a plain voiceless stop plus a fricative. For example, ' 'thick' is two syllables, ', with a syllabic fricative, while in ' 'stone', ' 'salt', ' 'crooked', ' 'to see' and ' 'wet' each consonant is a separate syllable. Stop-fricative sequences can also be disyllabic, however, as in ' 'strong' and ' 'rough'. Syllabification of stop-fricative sequences may therefore be lexicalized or a prosodic tendency. Fricative-fricative sequences also have a tendency toward syllabicity, e.g. with ' 'bad' being one syllable or two, and ' 'seal fat' being two syllables or three. Speech rate plays a role, with e.g. ' 'you spat on me' consisting of all syllabic consonants in citation form but condensed to stop-fricative syllables at fast conversational speed.
This syllabic structure may be compared with that of Miyako.
The linguist Hank Nater has postulated the existence of a phonemic contrast between syllabic and non-syllabic sonorants:, spelled ṃ, ṇ, ḷ. Words claimed to have unpredictable syllables include sṃnṃnṃuuc 'mute', smṇmṇcaw ' that they are children'.

Grammar

Events

The first element in a sentence expresses the event of the proposition. It inflects for the person and number of one or two participants.
Intr. inflectionSingularPlural
First Person-c-ł
Second Person-nu-ap
Third Person-Ø or -s-aw

E.g. ƛ̓ikm-Ø ti-wac̓-tx 'the dog is running'.
Whether the parenthesized segments are included in the suffix depends on whether the stem ends in an underlying resonant and whether it is non-syllabic. So qāχla 'drink' becomes qāχla-ł 'we drink', qāχla-nap 'you drink', qāχla-naw 'they drink', but nuyamł 'sing' becomes nuyamł-ił 'we're singing', nuyamł-ap 'you are singing', nuyamł-aw 'they're singing'.
However, the choice of the 3ps marker -Ø or -s is conditioned by semantics rather than phonetics. For example, the sentences tix-s ti-ʔimlk-tx and tix-Ø ti-ʔimlk-tx could both be glossed 'it's the man', but the first is appropriate if the man is the one who is normally chosen, while the second is making an assertion that it is the man who is chosen.
The following are the possible person markers for transitive verbs, with empty cells indications non-occurring combinations and '--' identifying semantic combinations which require the reflexive suffix -cut- followed by the appropriate intransitive suffix:
E.g. sp̓-is ti-ʔimlk-tx ti-stn-tx 'the man struck the tree'.
Whether a word can serve as an event isn't determined lexically, e.g. ʔimmllkī-Ø ti-nusʔūlχ-tx 'the thief is a boy', nusʔūlχ-Ø ti-q̓s-tx 'the one who is ill is a thief'.
There is a further causative paradigm whose suffixes may be used instead:
This has a passive counterpart:
Passive CausativeSingularPlural
First Person-tuminic-tuminił
Second Person-tumt-tutap
Third Person-tum-tutim

This may also have a benefactive gloss when used with events involving less activity of their participant, while in events with more active participants only the causative gloss is possible. In the later group even more active verbs have a preference for the affix-lx- before the causative suffix.
The executor in a transitive sentence always precedes the experiencer. However, when an event is proceeded by a lone participant, the semantic content of the event determines whether the participant is an executor or an experiencer. This can only be determined syntactically if the participant is marked by the preposition ʔuł-, which marks the experience.
Some events are inherently transitive or intransitive, but some may accept multiple valencies.
Prepositions may mark experiencers, and must mark implements. Any participants which are not marked by prepositions are focussed. There are three voices, which allow either the executor, the experiencer, or both to have focus:
The affix -amk- allows an implement to have its preposition removed and to be focused. For example:
There are four prepositions which have broad usage in Nuxalk:
PrepositionsProximalDistal
Stativex-ʔał-
Activeʔuł-wixłł-

Deixis

Nuxalk has a set of deictic prefixes and suffixes which serve to identify items as instantiations of domains rather than domains themselves and to locate them in deictic space. Thus the sentences wac̓-Ø ti-ƛ̓ikm-tx and ti-wac̓-Ø ti-ƛ̓ikm-tx, both 'the one that's running is a dog', are slightly different - similar to the difference between the English sentences 'the visitor is Canadian' and 'the visitor is a Canadian' respectively.
The deixis system has a proximal/medial/distal and a non-demonstrative/demonstrative distinction. Demonstratives may be used when finger pointing would be appropriate.
Proximal demonstrative space roughly corresponds to the area of conversation, and proximal non-demonstrative may be viewed as the area in which one could attract another's attention without raising one's voice. Visible space beyond this is middle demonstrative, space outside of this but within the invisible neighborhood is medial non-demonstrative. Everything else is distal, and non-demonstrative if not mentioned earlier.
The deictic prefixes and suffixes are as follows:
Female affixes are used only when the particular is singular and identified as female; if not, even if the particular is inanimate, masculine or plural is used.
The deictic prefixes only have a proximal vs. non-proximal distinction, and no demonstrative distinction:
Deictic
Prefixes		ProximalMedial and Distal
Masculineti-ta-
Feminineci-ła-
Pluralwa-ta-

tu- is used in earlier varieties and some types of narratives, except for middle non-demonstrative, and the variant ʔił- may be used "in the same collection of deictic space".
While events are not explicitly marked for tense per se, deixis plays a strong role in determining when the proposition is being asserted to occur. So in a sentence like mus-is ti-ʔimmllkī-tx ta-q̓lsxʷ-t̓aχ 'the boy felt that rope', the sentence is perceived as having a near-past interpretation, as the boy cannot be touching the rope in middle space from proximal space. However this does not hold for some events, like k̓x 'to see'.
A distal suffix on any participant lends the event a distant past interpretation, a medial suffix and no distal suffix lends a near past time, and if the participants are marked as proximal the time is present.
Not every distal participant occurs in past-tense sentences, and vice versa—rather, the deictic suffixes must either represent positions in space, time, or both.
The -m suffix is one of the most puzzling verbal affixes in the language. Some argue that it has varying uses of its morpheme, or that the suffix itself represents different morphemes due to the transitive bases the suffix consists of. The plural of the -m suffix has no known cognates. Another suffix is -uks. This suffix was never recorded, and there is skepticism about its derivatives. Some say that, because of the -uks suffix, Bella Coola influenced the Wakashan and Athapaskan languages, also originating from the British Columbian coast. Others believe, though, that the -uks suffix used in the Bella Coola language were previously recorded in the Chinook Jargon, thus it was taken from that language. At this point in time, linguists have two stances on this argument: either -uks did originate from the Chinook jargon, or -uks is one of the few elements originating from languages spoken south of the Salishan area of the British Columbia coast, which is difficult to decipher due to the lack of recorded evidence on it. Linguists are unsure what this meaning could bring. An opinion sometimes considered is that people of all the mentioned languages, from Chinook to Bella Coola to Wakashan/Athapaskan, were somehow congregated, and its people were, for more than a brief amount of time, associated with one another. This could have derived from intertribal marriages, which meshed the different structural components of the language to form one unique, syntactical language structure. We cannot testify to this hypothesis, though, due to the lack of archives previously produced/left behind by the people that once spoke these languages fluently.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns are reportedly nonexistent but the idea is expressed via verbs that translate as "to be me", etc.
PronounsSingularPlural
First personʔncłmił
Second personʔinułup
Third persontix,cixwix

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