The Shasta language is an extinct Shastan language formerly spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. It was spoken in a number of dialects, possibly including Okwanuchu. By 1980, only two fluent speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today, all surviving Shasta people speak English.
Consonants[edit]
Length is distinctive for consonants in Shasta. The affricates are generally written <c> and <č>, and the ejectives indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme /j/ is represented by <y>.
Shasta has four vowels, /i e a u/, with contrastive length, and two tones: high tone, marked with an acute accent, and low tone, which is unmarked.
References[edit]
- Mithun, Marianne (1999), The Languages of Native North America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
External links[edit]
