Coeur d'Alene language
| Coeur d'Alene | |
|---|---|
| Snchitsuʼumshtsn | |
| Native to | United States of America |
| Region | northern Idaho |
| Ethnicity | 80 Coeur d'Alene people (2000 census) |
|
Native speakers
|
2 (2007) |
|
Salishan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | coeu1236 |
Coeur d'Alene (Cœur d'Alène, snchitsu'umshtsn) is a Salishan language. It was spoken by only two of the 80 individuals in the Coeur d'Alene Tribe on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation in northern Idaho, United States in 1999. It is considered an endangered language. However, as of 2014, two elders in their 90s remain who grew up with snchitsu'umshtsn as their first language, and the use of the language is spreading among all age groups.
The Coeur d’Alene Names-Places Project visits geographic sites on the reservation recording video, audio, and still photos of Tribal elders who describe the site in both English and Coeur d’Alene languages.
The Coeur d'Alene Tribal Language Program and elders have actively promoted the use of the language, and have created computer sounds that use Snchitsu'umshtsn phrases. Radio station KWIS FM 88.3 in Plummer, Idaho offers programming to preserve the Snchitsu'umshtsn language.
Lawrence Nicodemus, "a retired judge and former tribal council member," became a scholar of the language. He had worked with linguist Gladys Reichard in his youth, and went on to create a grammar, dictionary, and instructional materials. Nicodemus taught language classes until his death at age 94. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s language program has "taught classes and worked with the language department to record more than 2,000 hours of audio and video." Classes are also available at North Idaho College.
There are three different orthographies presented in Table 1, giving the interpretations of previous scholarly works. Coeur d’Alene examples have been taken from the works of Nicodemus et al. as well as from the COLRC website.
Notes on Writing Systems
In Coeur d’Alene, there are eleven places of articulation: labial, alveolar, alveopalatal, lateral, labiovelar, uvular, labio-uvular, coronal pharyngeal, pharyngeal, labiopharyngeal, and laryngeal. Doak identifies six manners of articulation: plain and glottalized voiceless stops and affricates, voiced stops and affricate, voiceless fricatives, and plain and glottalized resonants.
Notes on Vowel Inventory
Introduction Coeur d'Alene is a morphosyntactically polysynthetic language. In Coeur d'Alene, a full clause can be expressed by affixing pronominal arguments and morphemes expressing aspect, transitivity and tense onto one verb stem (Doak,[13] 1997, p. 38). These affixes are discussed below.
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