Nitinaht language
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| Nitinaht | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Canada | |
| Region | Southern part of Vancouver Island, British Columbia | |
| Total speakers | 8 | |
| Language family | Wakashan
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | wak | |
| ISO 639-3 | noo | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Nitinaht (also Nitinat, Ditidaht, Southern Nootkan) is a South Wakashan (Nootkan) language spoken on the southern part of Vancouver Island. Nitinaht is related to the other South Wakashan languages, Makah and the neighboring Nuu-chah-nulth.
The number of Nitinaht speakers dwindled from about thirty in the 1990s[1] to just eight by 2006.[2] In 2003 the Ditidaht council approved construction of a $4.2 million Ditidaht Community School to teach students their language and culture from kindergarten to Grade 12 on the Ditidaht (Malachan) reserve. The program was successful in its first years and produced its first high-school graduate in 2005.[2]
As of July 2006, British linguistics professor Michael Fortescue has been living on the reserve, helping to complete a 500-page Ditidaht and Wakashan dictionary. The language only existed orally prior to 2002, but now has a 53-character alphabet and new terminology is being developed to adapt the language to modern technology. The Ditidaht have begun publishing the language to CD, DVD, and on FirstVoices.ca.[2]
The reason for the unusual discrepancy in the names Nitinaht and Ditidaht is that when the Nitinaht people were first contacted by Europeans they had nasal consonants (/m/, /n/) in their language, but soon afterwards these shifted to voiced plosives (/b/, /d/) as part of an areal trend. Nitinaht is thus one of only a handful of languages in the world which do not have nasal consonants.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN (hbk); ISBN-X.
- ^ a b c Kwong, Matthew. (2006-07-22). "Standing by their words". The Globe and Mail.
[edit] External links
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