Kutenai language
| Kutenai | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Canada, United States |
| Region | British Columbia, Montana, Idaho |
| Ethnicity | 1,510 Ktunaxa (2000 census – 2014) |
|
Native speakers
|
31 (2002–2014) |
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kute1249 |
Kutenai language
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The Kutenai language (English pronunciation: /ˈkuːtəneɪ, -tneɪ, -ni/), also Kootenai, Kootenay and Ktunaxa, is named after and is spoken by some of the Kutenai people Native American/First Nations, indigenous to the area of North America that is now Montana and Idaho, United States, and British Columbia, Canada. It is a language isolate, unrelated to the Salishan family of languages spoken by neighboring tribes on the coast and in the interior Plateau.
Kutenai is a language isolate. There have been attempts to place Kutenai in either a Macro-Algonquian or Macro-Salishan language family, most recently with Salish, but they have not been generally accepted as proven.
Like other languages in the area, Kutenai has a rich inventory of consonants and a small inventory of vowels. But, there are other allophones of the three basic phonemic vowels. The lack of a phonemic distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is much like other languages of the area. Due to Kutenai's location on the periphery of this linguistic area, the loss of a rich lateral inventory is consistent with other nearby languages, which now have only one or two lateral consonants. One such language group contains the Sahaptian languages, which have had a similar loss of laterals. Nez Perce has /ts/, believed to be the lateral affricate in the proto-language. Nez Perce, like Kutenai, lies in the eastern periphery of the Northwest Linguistic area.
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