Makah language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Makah language, usually called only Makah, as are the people who speak it, is the only member of the Waskashan language family in the United States. According to the Ethnologue, it has been extinct as a first language since 2002, when its last native speaker died. It is spoken by the Makah people who reside in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and is used in preschool in the Makah community.

Makah is closely related to Nuu-chah-nulth and Nitinat, which are the languages of the peoples of the west coast of Vancouver Island on the north side of the strait in the Canadian province of British Columbia. The Makah language, also known as q^wi·q^wi·diččaq (qwiqwidiccaq, first letter not capitalized) is the only member of this family in the United States, with the other members spoken by in British Columbia, Canada, immediately across the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the west coast of Vancouver Island and northwards as far as that province's Central Coast region.

The Makah language and the Nuu-chah-nulth and Nitinat languages belong to the Southern Nootkan branch of the Wakashan family of languages. The Northern Wakashan languages are Kwak'wala, Heiltsuk-Oowekyala and Haisla, which are farther north beyond the territory of the Nuu-chah-nulth people.

[edit] Grammar

The Makah language is well known for its characteristic of evidentiality (that is, a speaker's knowledge about the sources of a statement) being encoded in morphology.

Some examples of this:

Example	Translation	Distinction
wiki?chaxaw	it's bad weather	seen or experienced directly
wiki?chaxakpi?d	it looks like bad weather	on the physical evidence
wiki?chaxakqad?i	it sounds like bad weather	on the evidence of hearing
wiki?chaxakwa?d	I am told there's bad weather	quoting someone else