- Puget Sound area of Washington State
- member of the Coast branch of the Salishan family
- roughly divided into two dialects, Northern and Southern
- currently only spoken as a native language by a few elderly speakers
- maintained as a heritage language in some communities
- well-documented through audio recordings of Elders, dictionaries, and pedagogical materials
Typological features:
- rigid VSO, mildly polysynthetic
- little inflectional morphology
- bare patient-oriented radicals
- derivational affixes regulate transitivity
- clause structure determined by Information Structure rather than syntax
- 37 consonants, ejective and labialized series, glottalized resonants
- tolerates clusters of up to 5 obstruents
Links