Comox language
| Comox | |
|---|---|
| Éy7á7juuthem | |
| Native to | Canada |
| Region | British Columbia |
| Ethnicity | 1,900 Comox people in 3 of 4 communities (2014, FPCC). |
|
Native speakers
|
36 in 3 of 4 communities (2014, FPCC) |
|
Salishan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | como1259 |
Comox, also known as K'omoks, Sliammon, ɬəʔamɛn and Ayeahjuthum, is a Coast Salish language historically spoken in the northern Georgia Strait region, spanning the east coast of Vancouver Island and the northern Sunshine Coast and adjoining inlets and islands.
It has two main dialects, Island Comox, associated with the K'omoks First Nation, and Mainland Comox, associated with the Sliammon(?ay?adzhúth@m), Klahoose and Homalhco peoples. As of 2012, "The Island Comox dialect has no remaining speakers," according to Ethnologue.
A Sliammon iPhone app was released in March 2012. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at First Voices.
The sound inventory is transcribed as follows:
Phonological features:
Comox has a larɡe number of uvular consonants (q, qʷ, qʼ, qʷʼ, x̩, x̩ʷ). Czaykowski-Higgins notes that "phonetic work on Salish has mainly focused on the properties of uvular, pharyngeal, and retracting consonants. This is hardly surprising given that few language families have as extensive postvelar inventories as those found in Salish."
"Salishan languages are highly polysynthetic, employing numerous suffixes and reduplication patterns; prefixes and infixes are less numerous. Words often include lexical suffixes referring to concrete physical objects or abstract extensions from them."
Comox has essentially lost all derivational prefixes. It is the only language in the Salish family to have lost the nominalizing prefix s- from its morphological inventory (Kroeber 11). However, the morphologically mirrored -s interestingly serves as a marker for 3rd person possession (Kroeber 111). Hagège has found certain cases where both the prefixive s- and the suffixive -s occur in circumspection. Kroeber is wary to support the finding, but offers the following: "This would appear to be a complex of the nominalizing prefix s- and the third person possessive -s; that is, the third person form of the sort of nominalized construction widely used for subordination in Salish."(Kroeber 115).
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