| Ditidaht (dee-tee-dot) | |
|---|---|
| Nitinaht | |
| diitiid7aa7tx, [1] diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ | |
| Native to | Canada |
| Region | Southern part of Vancouver Island, British Columbia |
| Ethnicity | 940 Ditidaht (2014, FPCC); [2] formerly also the Pacheedaht |
Native speakers | 7 (2014, FPCC) [2] |
Wakashan
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
dtd |
| Glottolog |
diti1235 |
| ELP | Diitiidʔaatx̣ (Nitinat) |
Ditidaht [dee-tee-dot] (also Nitinaht, Nitinat, Southern Nootkan) or diitiidʔaaʔtx̣ is a South Wakashan (Nootkan) language spoken on the southern part of Vancouver Island. Nitinaht is related to the other South Wakashan languages, Makah and the neighboring Nuu-chah-nulth.
Status and history
The number of native Ditidaht speakers dwindled from about thirty in the 1990s [3] to just eight by 2006. [4] In 2003 the Ditidaht council approved construction of a $4.2 million community school to teach students on the Ditidaht ( Malachan) reserve their language and culture from kindergarten to Grade 12. The program was successful in its first years and produced its first high-school graduate in 2005. [4] In 2014, the number of fluent Ditidaht speakers was 7, the number of individuals who have a good grasp on the language 6, and there were 55 people learning the language. [5]
Ditidaht has been the subject of considerable linguistic research including the publication of texts and, in 1981, an introductory university-level textbook. [6]
Characteristics
The reason for the unusual discrepancy in the names Nitinaht and Ditidaht is that when the Ditidaht people were first contacted by Europeans, they had nasal consonants (/m/, /n/) in their language. Their autonym of Nitinaht was what the Europeans recorded for them and their language. Soon afterward the consonants shifted to voiced plosives (/b/, /d/) as part of an areal trend, so the people came to call themselves Ditidaht. Ditidaht is thus one of only a handful of languages in the world that do not have nasal consonants.
Phonology
Consonants
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | sibilant | lateral | plain | lab. | plain | lab. | ||||||
|
Plosive/ Affricate |
voiceless | p | t | ts | tɬ | tʃ | k | kʷ | q | qʷ | ʔ | |
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | tsʼ | tɬʼ | tʃʼ | kʼ | kʼʷ | qʼ | qʼʷ | |||
| voiced | b | d | ||||||||||
| glottalized | ˀb | ˀd | ||||||||||
| Fricative | s | ɬ | ʃ | x | xʷ | χ | χʷ | ʕ | h | |||
| Sonorant | voiced | m | n | l | j | w | ||||||
| glottalized | ˀm | ˀn | ˀl | ˀj | ˀw | |||||||
Vowels
Vowels are phonemically transcribed as /i e a o u/ and /iː eː aː oː uː/. [7] They are noted phonetically as:
| Phoneme | Sound | Phoneme | Sound |
|---|---|---|---|
| /i/ | [ɪ] ~ [i] | /iː/ | [iː] |
| /e/ | [ɛ] ~ [æ] | /eː/ | [æː] |
| /a/ | [ʌ] ~ [ɑ] | /aː/ | [ɑː] |
| /o/ | [o] | /oː/ | [oː] ~ [ɔː] |
| /u/ | [ʊ] ~ [u] | /uː/ | [u] |
See also
Notes
- ^ http://www.ditidaht.ca/history.htm#THE Archived 2014-02-28 at the Wayback Machine DITIDAHT PEOPLE
- ^ a b Ditidaht (dee-tee-dot) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ a b Kwong, Matthew. (2006-07-22). " Standing by their words". The Globe and Mail.
- ^ "Ditidaht First Nation". Archived from the original on 2014-03-24. Retrieved 2014-03-24.
- ^ "Ditidat Bibliography".
- ^ Werle, Adam (2007). Ditidaht Vowel Alternations and Prosody. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: The Canadian Journal of Linguistics.