Tillamook language

Tillamook
Native to	United States
Region	Northwestern Oregon
Ethnicity	Tillamook, Siletz
Extinct	1970[1]
Language family	Salishan Coast Salish Tillamook
Dialects	Tillamook Siletz
Language codes
ISO 639-3	til
Glottolog	till1254[2]

Tillamook is an extinct Salishan language, formerly spoken by the Tillamook people in northwestern Oregon, United States. The last fluent speaker is believed to have died in the 1970s; between 1965 and 1972, in an effort to prevent the language from being lost, a group of researchers from the University of Hawaii interviewed the few remaining Tillamook-speakers and created a 120-page dictionary.^[3]

Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Back
High	i	ə
Low	æ	ɑ

Consonants

	Alveolar		Postalveolar / palatal	Velar		Uvular		Glottal
	Central	Lateral		Unrounded	"Rounded"	Unrnd.	"Rnd."
Stop	t			k	kᵓ	q	qᵓ	ʔ
Ejective	tʼ			kʼ	kᵓʼ	qʼ	qᵓʼ
Affricate	t͡s		t͡ʃ
Ejective affricate	t͡sʼ	t͡ɬʼ	t͡ʃʼ
Fricative	s	ɬ	ʃ	x	xᵓ	χ	χᵓ	h
Nasal	n
Approximant		ɬ	j		ɰᵓ

Internal Rounding

The so-called "rounded" consonants (traditionally marked with the diacritic ⟨ʷ⟩, but here indicated with ⟨ᵓ⟩), including rounded vowels and ⟨w⟩ (/ɰᵓ/), are not actually labialized. The acoustic effect of labialization is created entirely inside the mouth by cupping the tongue. Uvulars with this distinctive internal rounding have "a kind of ɔ timbre" while "rounded" front velars have ɯ coloring. These contrast and oppose otherwise very similar segments having ɛ or j coloring—the "unrounded" consonants.

/w/ is also formed with this internal rounding instead of true labialization, making it akin to [ɰ]. So are vowel sounds formerly written as /o/ or /u/, which are best characterized as the diphthong /əɰ/ with increasing internal rounding.^[4]

Notes

1. Tillamook at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Tillamook". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Official site of Clatsop-Nehalem Confederated Tribes
4. Thompson & Thompson (1966), p. 316

Bibliography

• Thompson, Lawrence C.; M. Terry Thompson (1966). "A Fresh Look at Tillamook Phonology". International Journal of American Linguistics 32 (4): 313–319. doi:10.1086/464920.
• Edel, May M (1939). The Tillamook language. New York: J.J. Augustin. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
• "May M. Edel papers". Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries. Retrieved 2013-09-22.

External links

• University of Oregon: The Tillamook
• Tillamook Language
• "Tillamook Vocabulary". California Language Archive. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
• OLAC resources in and about the Tillamook language