Here is the long-awaited grammar of the Musqueam dialect of Halkomelem, which Wayne Suttles began work on in the late 1950s. The Musqueam people's aboriginal territory includes much of the Fraser Delta and the city of Vancouver. Halkomelem is one of the twenty-three languages that belong to the Salish Family.

Suttles, an anthropologist, worked with knowledgeable older people, eliciting traditional stories, personal narratives, and ethnographic accounts. The grammar covers the usual topics of phonology, morphology, and syntax, illustrated by numerous sentences selected for their...

Witsuwit?en is an endangered First Nations language, spoken in western-central British Columbia. A member of the Athapaskan family of languages, the language has been known to have some intriguingcharacteristics of consonant-vowel interaction, the details of which have been in dispute among scholars.

Witsuwit?en Grammar presents acoustic studies of several aspects of Witsuwit?en phonetics, including vowel quality, vowel quantity, ejectives, voice quality, and stress. Information about the sound system and word structure of Witsuwit?en is also provided, revealing many unusual features...

Rich in cultural and linguistic information, the traditional stories of the Coast Salish people contain the keys to cultural revitalization. Tellings from Our Elders presents eighteen stories in Snohomish, a dialect of Lushootseed, the language of the indigenous peoples who live on the southern and eastern shores of Puget Sound, as told by members of the last generation to claim the language as their mother tongue.

Many of these stories - or syeyehub - were recorded decades ago, but few were transcribed, and even fewer analyzed. Deep understanding of the structure and...