Cowlitz language
The Cowlitz language is a member of the Tsamosan branch of the Coast Salish family of Salishan languages.
| Cowlitz | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Southwestern Washington |
| Ethnicity | 200 Cowlitz people (1990)[1] As of 2019 over 2,000 and growing |
| Extinct | maybe 2 speakers in 1990.[1] 1 currently lives in Puyallup, Washington |
| Revival | the 110 listed in 2010 census[2] are not native speakers |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cow |
| Glottolog | cowl1242 |
The Cowlitz people
The Cowlitz people were originally two distinct tribes: the Lower Cowlitz and the Upper Cowlitz. Only the Lower Cowlitz spoke Cowlitz; the Upper Cowlitz, a Sahaptin tribe, spoke a dialect of Yakama.
Phonology
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | sibilant | lateral | plain | lab. | plain | lab. | |||||
| Plosive/ Affricate |
plain | p | t | ts | tʃ | k | kʷ | q | qʷ | ʔ | |
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | tsʼ | tɬʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | kʷʼ | qʼ | qʷʼ | ||
| Fricative | s | ɬ | ʃ | x | xʷ | χ | χʷ | h | |||
| Sonorant | plain | m | n | l | j | w | |||||
| glottalized | mˀ | nˀ | lˀ | jˀ | wˀ | ||||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e eː | ə | oː |
| Open | a aː |
Vocabulary
Cowlitz is most similar to Lower Chehalis, another Tsamosan language, although it contains some oddities, such as the word for one, utsus (in contrast to the Lower Chehalis paw).
| English | Cowlitz |
|---|---|
| Lower Cowlitz tribe | Sł'púlmš |
| one (number) | utsus |
| two | salli |
| three | kałi |
| four | mus |
| five | tsilats |
| to sing | ilani |
| moon/sun | Łuqał |
| dog | kaxa |
| water | kal'l |
| man | siłimx |
| woman | kuwił |
References
- Cowlitz at Ethnologue (14th ed., 2000).
- Cowlitz at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- Kinkade, Marvin Dale (2004). Cowlitz dictionary and grammatical sketch. Missoula, MT: Linguistics Laboratory, University of Montana. pp. 219–224.
- Native-Languages.org.
- Kinkade, Dale. Cowlitz Dictionary And Grammatical Sketch. Missoula: University of Montana Press, 2004.
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