Chilcotin language

Chilcotin has 47 consonants:

• Like many other Athabaskan languages, Chilcotin does not have a contrast between fricatives and approximants.
• The alveolar series is pharyngealized.
• Dentals and alveolars:
  • Both Krauss (1975) and Cook (1993) describe the dental and alveolar as being essentially identical in articulation, postdental, with the only differentiating factor being their different behaviours in the vowel flattening processes (described below).
  • Gafos (1999, personal communication with Cook) describes the dental series as apico-laminal denti-alveolar and the alveolar series as lamino-postalveolar.

Chilcotin has 6 vowels:

• Chilcotin has both tense and lax vowel phonemes. Additionally, tense vowels may become lax from vowel laxing.

Every given Chilcotin vowel has a number of different phonetic realizations from complex phonological processes (such as nasalization, laxing, flattening). For instance, the vowel /i/ can be variously pronounced [i, ĩ, ɪ, e, ᵊi, ᵊĩ, ᵊɪ].

Chilcotin is a tonal language with two tones: high tone and low tone.

Chilcotin has vowel flattening and consonant harmony. Consonant harmony (sibilant harmony) is rather common in the Athabaskan language family. Vowel flattening is unique to Chilcotin but is similar to phonological processes in other unrelated Interior Salishan languages spoken in the same area, such as Shuswap, St'át'imcets, and Thompson River Salish (and thus was probably borrowed into Chilcotin). That type of harmony is an areal feature common in this region of North America. The Chilcotin processes, however, are much more complicated.

Vowel nasalization is a phonological process by which the phoneme /n/ is nasalizes the preceding vowel. It occurs when the vowel + /n/ sequence is followed by a (tautosyllabic) continuant consonant (such as /ɬ, sˤ, zˤ, ç, j, χ/).

Vowel laxing is a process by which tense vowels (/i, u, æ/) become lax when followed by a syllable-final /h/: the tense and lax distinction is neutralized.

Chilcotin has a type of retracted tongue root harmony. Generally, "flat" consonants lower vowels in both directions. Assimilation is both progressive and regressive.

Chilcotin consonants can be grouped into three categories: neutral, sharp, and flat.

• Flat consonants trigger vowel flattening.
• Sharp consonants block vowel flattening.
• Neutral consonants do not affect vowel flattening in any way.

The flat consonants can be further divided into two types:

1. a sˤ-series (i.e. /tsˤ, tsʰˤ, tsʼˤ/ˌ etc.), and
2. a q-series (i.e. /q, qʷ, qʰ/ˌ etc.).

The sˤ-series is stronger than the q-series by affecting vowels farther away.

This table shows both unaffected vowels and flattened vowels:

The vowel /i/ surfaces as [ᵊi] if after a flat consonant and as [e] before a flat consonant:

The progressive and regressive flattening processes are described below.

In the progressive (left-to-right) flattening, the q-series consonants affect only the immediately following vowel:

Like the q-series, the stronger sˤ-series consonants affects the immediately following vowel. However, it affects the vowel in the following syllable as well if the first flattened vowel is a lax vowel. If the first flattened is tense, the vowel of the following syllable is not flattened.

Thus, the neutral consonants aretransparen in the flattening process. In the first word /sˤɛɬ.tʰin/ 'he's comatose', /sˤ/ flattens the /ɛ/ of the first syllable to [ə] and the /i/ of the second syllable to [ᵊi]. In the word /sˤi.tʰin/ 'I'm sleeping', /sˤ/ flattens /i/ to [ᵊi]. Since, however, the vowel of the first syllable is /i/, which is a tense vowel, the /sˤ/ cannot flatten the /i/ of the second syllable.

The sharp consonants, however, block the progressive flattening caused by the sˤ-series:

In regressive (right-to-left) harmony, the q-series flattens the preceding vowel.

The regressive (right-to-left) harmony of the sˤ-series, however, is much stronger than the progressive harmony. The consonants flatten all preceding vowels in a word:

Both progressive and regressive flattening processes occur in Chilcotin words: