Coast Tsimshian
| Tsimshian | |
|---|---|
| Sm'algyax | |
| Native to | Canada, United States |
| Region | northwest British Columbia, southeast Alaska |
| Ethnicity | ca. 10,000 Tsimshian people (8,200 counting 4 of 6 Canadian communities, 2007–2014) |
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Native speakers
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perhaps 200: 110 in 4 of 6 communities in Canada; 70 in the USA (2007–2014) |
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Tsimshianic
|
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | |
| ISO 639-3 |
|
| Glottolog | coas1300 |
Pre-contact distribution of Tsimshianic languages
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Tsimshian, known by its speakers as Sm'álgyax, is a dialect of the Tsimshian language spoken in northwestern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska. Sm'algyax means literally "real or true language."
There is much debate over which larger family the Tsimshianic languages belong to. Many scholars believe that they are part of the controversial Penutian language stock, which includes languages spoken throughout the Pacific Northwest and California. Though probable, the existence of a Penutian stock has yet to be definitively proven. Some linguists still maintain that the Tsimshianic family is not closely related to any North American language.
The linguist Tonya Stebbins estimated the number of speakers of Tsimshian in 2001 as around 400 and in 2003 as 200 or fewer (see references below). Whichever figure is more accurate, she added in 2003 that most speakers are over 70 in age and very few are under 50. About 50 of an ethnic population of 1,300 Tsimshian in Alaska speak the language.
Next to transcriptions in the IPA are the conventional orthography in angle brackets.
The low back vowel can either be the long [a] or the short and slightly raised [ʌ] depending on context. John Asher Dunn assumes this vowel as the schwa.
Underlining /a/ is optional for indicating the back long vowel, and fluent speakers will usually omit it.
Dunn's representation of the high back vowel seems to be slightly more forward than the IPA equivalent, since he uses the phonetic symbols [ɨ̈] or [ɪ̈].
As in the Vowels section, symbols in boldface reflect the conventional orthography, and IPA equivalents are given in brackets. In the practical orthography, uvulars are indicated by underlining the velar letters, ⟨ḵ g̲⟩, and the position of the apostrophe before or after the consonant letter distinguishes glottalization.
Both John Asher Dunn and Franz Boas (as reported by A.C. Graf von der Schulenberg ) find that the fricative /s/ has two variants: [s] or [ʃ].
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