Coast Salish languages
Salishan language family subgroup of Pacific Nortwestern Indigenous Americans
The Coast Salish languages, also known as the Central Salish languages, are a branch of the Salishan language family. These languages are spoken by First Nations or Native American peoples inhabiting the Pacific Northwest, in the territory that is now known as the southwest coast of British Columbia around the Strait of Georgia and Washington State around Puget Sound. The term "Coast Salish" also refers to the cultures in British Columbia and Washington who speak one of these languages or dialects.
Geography
The Coast Salish languages are spoken around most of the Georgia and Puget Sound Basins, an area that encompasses the sites of the modern-day cities of Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington, and others. Archeological evidence indicates that Coast Salish peoples may have inhabited the area as far back as 9000 BCE. What is now Seattle, for example, has been inhabited since the end of the last glacial period (c. 8,000 BCE—10,000 years ago).
In the past, the Nuxálk language (also known as Bella Coola) of British Columbia's Central Coast has also been considered Coast Salish. This language shares at least one phonological change with Coast Salish (the merger of the Proto-Salish pharyngeal approximants with the uvular fricatives), but it also displays certain similarities to the Interior Salish languages. If it is indeed a member of the Coast Salish branch, it was the first to split off from the rest.
Classification
The Coast Salish languages can be classified in anywhere from one to three branches.
“Coast Salish languages” enters the record as salishan language family subgroup of Pacific Nortwestern Indigenous Americans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Coast, Salish and languages can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coast Salish languages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.