Kwakʼwala

Kwakʼwala or Kwak̓wala (), previously known as Kwakiutl (), is a Wakashan language spoken by about 150 Kwakwakaʼwakw people around Queen Charlotte Strait on the coast of British Columbia. It has shared considerable influence with other languages of the Pacific Northwest, especially those of the unrelated Salishan family. While Kwakʼwala is classified as critically endangered according to UNESCO, revitalization efforts are underway to preserve the language.

While Kwakʼwala had no written records until European contact, archeological and linguistic evidence shed light on its prehistory. Northern and Southern branches of the Wakashan language family split approximately 2,900 years ago. Northern Wakashan (or Kwakiutlan) speakers likely expanded outward from the north of Vancouver Island, displacing Salishan languages on the mainland of what is now British Columbia. Kwakʼwala was first written by missionaries during the colonization of the Pacific Northwest. As part of its policy of forced cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, the Canadian government suppressed Kwakʼwala and outlawed its attendant culture through the late 19th to mid-20th centuries; as of the early 21st century, elders and second-language learners are currently rebuilding its speaking population.

Kwakʼwala has complex word formation, featuring a polysynthetic morphology that is almost exclusively suffixing like other Wakashan languages. Its verbs feature suffixes for mood, aspect, and person, with multiple of these meanings often existing in a single suffix. Kwakʼwala's nouns feature case suffixes marking the subject, object, and instrument within a phrase, as well as spatial relationships including distance from and visibility to the speaker. These suffixes can trigger consonant mutation in the stem which they inflect. It is also phonologically complex; its rich consonant inventory contains phonemes that are cross-linguistically uncommon. As a part of the Pacific Northwest sprachbund, Kwakʼwala shares many typological features in common with indigenous languages of that region.

From Wikipedia · Kwakʼwala · CC BY-SA 4.0