Miluk language
| Miluk | |
|---|---|
| Lower Coquille | |
| Pronunciation | míluk |
| Region | Oregon |
| Ethnicity | Miluk people |
| Extinct | 1939 (last functional speaker 1961) |
|
Coosan
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
iml |
| Glottolog | milu1241 |
Miluk, also known as Lower Coquille from its location, is one of two Coosan languages. It shares more than half of its vocabulary with Coos proper (Hanis), though these are not always obvious, and grammatical differences cause the two languages to look quite different. Miluk started being displaced by Athabascan in the late 18th century, and many Miluk shifted to Athabascan and Hanis.
Miluk was spoken around the lower Coquille River and the South Slough of Coos Bay. The name míluk is the endonym, derived from a village name. The last fully fluent speaker of Miluk was Annie Miner Peterson, who died in 1939. She knew both Miluk and Hanis, and made a number of recordings. Laura Hodgkiss Metcalf, who died in 1961, was the last functional speaker (her mother was Miluk), and was an informant to Morris Swadesh for his Penutian Vocabulary Survey.
The phonological description of Miluk is somewhat inconsistent. The following proposed inventory is one attempt to explain the data:
Stops are tenuis in syllable onsets before a vowel, and aspirated in syllable codas and before another consonant. It is not clear if [h] and [hʷ] are phonemic; they may be allophones of /x/ and /xʷ/.
The vowels in Milluk are /i, u, ə, ɛ, ɑ/.
Vowel harmony occurs in Miluk, although sporadic. The most common occurrence of vowel harmony in Miluk is the harmonization of /ɛ/ in roots with /ɑ/ in suffixes.
In Miluk, the possessive noun phrase precedes what is possessed. The possessed noun takes no article but instead is marked with the oblique [tə]. Miluk has an inclusive and exclusive distinction when it comes to the dual possessive. In the first person dual inclusive, the words receive the circumfix s=nə-, while the first person dual exclusive receives the prefix nə-.
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