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'Saanich' (also , written as 'SENĆOŦEN' in Saanich orthography) is the language of the Native American Saanich people. Saanich is a member of a dialect continuum called ''Northern Straits'' which is a Coast Salishan language. North Straits varieties are closely related to the Klallam language.

Contents

Sounds

Vowels

Consonants

Writing system

Grammar

Metathesis

External links

Bibliography

Sounds

Vowels

Consonants

		Bi­labial	Dental	Alveolar	Lateral	Post­alveolar	Palatal	Velar		Uvular		Glottal
								Plain	Rounded	Plain	Rounded
Stop	Plain
	Glottalized
Affricate	Plain
	Glottalized
Fricative
Nasal	Plain
	Glottalized
Approximant	Plain
	Glottalized

The unrounded velar stop is found only in loanwords, such as CEPU (IPA: ) "coat", from French.
are also written , although they are grooved, not interdental. The uvular nasals are also written , but they are not velar.
The status of the glottalized resonants is not agreed upon. Some linguists analyse them as unit phonemes, others as sequences of a plain resonant and a glottal stop .

Writing system

The Saanich orthography was created by Dave Elliot in 1978. It uses only uppercase letters, with one exception: the letter 's', which marks the third person possessive suffix.

A	Á		B	C	Ć		D	E	H
I	Í	J	K	¹			L		M
N		O	P	Q	S	Ś	T
Ŧ	U	W		X		Y	Z	s
							?

''¹The K with a bar has not yet been adopted by Unicode.''
The glottal stop is not always indicated, but may be written with a comma: ','.
Plain and glottalized resonants are not distinguished.
The vowel is usually written 'Á', unless it occurs next to an uvular consonant (), where it is written 'A'.

Grammar

Metathesis

In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical devise to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most often translated into English as a ''be …-ing'' progressive. The actual aspect is derived from the "nonactual" verb form by a CV → VC metathesis process (i.e. consonant metathesizes with vowel).

'T̵X̲ÉT' 'shove' (nonactual)	→	'T̵ÉX̲T' 'shoving' (actual)
'ṮPÉX̲' 'scatter' (nonactual)	→	'ṮÉPX̲' 'scattering' (actual)
'' 'pinch' (nonactual)	→	'' 'pinching' (actual)

External links

★ An Outline of the Morphology and Phonology of Saanich, North Straits Salish (1986) (Timothy Montler's site)

★
★ Phonology

★
★ Morphology

★
★ Sample text

★ Saanich Classified Word List (1991) (Timothy Montler's site)

★ SENĆOŦEN (Saanich, Northern Straits Salish) (Chris Harvey's Native Language, Font & Keyboard)

★ Saanich Indian School Board

★ SENĆOŦEN Welcome page (First Voices)

Bibliography

★ Bill, Adriane; Cayou, Roxanne; & Jim, Jacquelin. (2003). '' [One green tree]''. Victoria, B.C.: First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation & Tribal School. ISBN 1-4120-0626-0.

★ Mithun, Marianne. (1999). ''The languages of Native North America''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.

★ Montler, Timothy. (1986). ''An outline of the morphology and phonology of Saanich, North Straits Salish''. Occasional Papers in Linguistics (No. 4). Missoula, MT: University of Montana Linguistics Laboratory. (Web version of the author's PhD dissertation, University of Hawaii).

★ Montler, Timothy. (1996). Languages and dialects in Straits Salishan. ''Proceedings of the International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages'', ''31'', 249-256.

★ Montler, Timothy. (1999). Language and dialect variation in Straits Salishan. ''Anthropological linguistics'', ''41'' (4), 462-502.

★ Thompson, Laurence; Thompson, M. Terry; & Efrat, Barbara. (1974). Some phonological developments in Straits Salish. ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', ''40'', 182-196.

★ [Claxton, Earl, Sr.]; & [Elliot, John, Sr.]. (1994). ''Reef Net Technology of the Saltwater People''. Brentwood Bay, B.C.: Saanich Indian School Board.