| Shasta | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | United States | |
| Region | primarily northern California | |
| Language extinction | by end of 20th century | |
| Language family | Shastan
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | nai | |
| ISO 639-3 | sht | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Shasta language is an extinct Shastan language formerly spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. By 1980, only two fluent speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today, all surviving Shasta people speak English.
Contents |
Sounds
Consonants
| Bilabial | Dental | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ||||
| Stop | plain | p | t | k | ʔ | |
| ejective | pʼ | tʼ | kʼ | |||
| Affricate | plain | ts | tʃ | |||
| ejective | tsʼ | tʃʼ | ||||
| Fricative | s | x | h | |||
| Rhotic | r | |||||
| Approximant | j | w | ||||
Length is distinctive for consonants in Shasta. The affricates are generally written <c> and <č>, and the ejectives indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme /j/ is represented by <y>.
Vowels
Shasta has four vowels, /i e a u/, with contrastive length, and two tones: high tone, marked with an acute accent, and low tone, which is unmarked.
References
- Mithun, Marianne (1999), The Languages of Native North America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
External links
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