Salishan
25 languages
Salishan is a language family of 25 languages; the most are spoken in United States and Canada.
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The Salishan languages ( SAY-lish-ən), also known as the Salish languages ( SAY-lish), are a family of languages spoken in the Pacific Northwest of North America, including the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. They are characterised by agglutination and ejective consonants.
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 Bitterroot Salish. 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.
From Wikipedia · Salishan languages · CC BY-SA 4.0