Salishan languages

The Salishan languages (/ˈseɪlɪʃən/ SAY-lish-ən), also known as the Salish languages (/ˈseɪlɪʃ/ SAY-lish), are a family of languages found in the Pacific Northwest in North America, namely 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’^ⓘ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]), meaning 'he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant', has twelve 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. The name Salish or Selisch is the endonym of the Flathead Nation. Linguists later applied the name Salish to related languages in the Pacific Northwest. Many of the peoples do not have self-designations (autonyms) in their languages; they frequently have specific names for local dialects, as the local group was more important culturally than larger tribal relations.

All Salishan languages are considered critically endangered, some extremely so with only three or four speakers left. Those languages considered extinct are often referred to as "dormant languages", in that no speakers exist currently, but still serve as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group. In the early 21st century, few Salish languages have more than 2,000 speakers. Fluent daily speakers of almost all Salishan languages are generally over sixty years of age; many languages have only speakers over eighty.

Salishan languages are most commonly written using the Americanist phonetic notation to account for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in most modern alphabets.^{[citation needed]} Many groups have evolved their own distinctive uses of the Latin alphabet, however, such as the Saanich.

The Salishan language family consists of twenty-three languages. The family is typically organized into two main divisions with variation: Coast Salish (Coast Division), Interior Salish (Interior Division), Tillamook, and Nuxalk. Nuxalk is sometimes classified as part of the Coastal Division of languages. Tillamook is also sometimes classified as part of the Coast Division. It was proposed by Morris Swadesh that the Olympic branch of Coast Salishan languages is a natural subdivision within the family, although linguists today generally accept the Olympic branch as a subgrouping within the Coast Salish division. The Interior Salish languages have a higher degree of closeness to each other than the more distant Coast Salish languages.

Below is a list of Salishan languages, dialects, and subdialects. The genetic unity among the Salish languages is evident. Neighboring groups have communicated often, to the point that it is difficult to untangle the influence each dialect and language has upon others. This list is a linguistic classification that may not correspond to political divisions. In contrast to classifications made by linguistic scholars, many Salishan groups consider their particular variety of speech to be a separate language rather than a dialect.^{[citation needed]}

Languages or dialects with no living native speakers are marked with † at the highest level.