Salishan Languages (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Salishan languages are a group of languages of the Pacific Northwest. They are characterised by agglutinativity and astonishing consonant clusters-for instance the Nuxalk word x p x t p sk c meaning "he had had a bunchberry plant" has 13 consonants in a row with no vowels. The terms Salish and Salishan are used interchangeably by Salishan linguists and anthropologists. The name Salish is actually the endonym of the Flathead Nation. The name was later extended by linguists to refer to other related languages. Many languages do not have self-designations and instead have specific names for local dialects as the local group was more important culturally than larger tribal relations.