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Concept
Lushootseed
Summary
Lushootseed (dxwləšucid, txwəlšucid), also Puget Salish, Puget Sound Salish or Skagit-Nisqually, is a language made up of a dialect continuum of several Salish tribes of modern-day Washington state. Lushootseed is one of the Coast Salish languages, one of two main divisions of the Salishan language family.
Its pre-contact range extended from around modern-day Olympia, Washington to Bellingham, Washington, spoken by roughly 12000 at its peak. The dialects of the language can be split into two categories: northern and southern, which can further be split into dialects spoken by the individual peoples who spoke it. Today, it is mostly used in heritage and symbolic purposes, like on signage or place names. It is seldom spoken today, and is classified as Critically Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.
The name comes from ləš, an old name for the saltwater in the Puget Sound, and dxw...ucid, meaning 'language,' roughly translating to 'language of the Puget Sound.' The southern pronunciation txwəlsucid is derived from the original by devoicing d into t and switching the position of l and ə.
Lushootseed has a complex consonantal phonology and 4 vowel phonemes. Along with more common voicing and labialization contrasts, Lushootseed has a plain-glottalic contrast, which is realized as laryngealized with sonorants, ejective with voiceless stops or fricatives.
Lushootseed has no phonemic nasals. However, the nasals [m], [m̰], [n], and [n̰] may appear in some speech styles and words as variants of /b/ and /d/.
Lushootseed can be considered a relatively agglutinating language, given its high number of morphemes, including a large number of lexical suffixes. Word order is fairly flexible, although it is generally considered to be verb-subject-object (VSO).
Lushootseed is capable of creating grammatically correct sentences that contain only a verb, with no subject or object. All information beyond the action is to be understood by context. This can be demonstrated in ʔuʔəy’dub '[someone] managed to find [someone/something]'.
Official source
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