Heiltsuk (,William C. Sturtevant, 1978. Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast ), also known as Heiltsuk-Xai’xais, Bella Bella, or Haihais, is a dialect of the North Wakashan (Kwakiutlan) language Heiltsuk-Oowekyala that is spoken by the Xai'xais and Heiltsuk First Nations peoples of the Central Coast region of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Bella Bella is the headquarters of the Heiltsuk Nation government. There are only seven fluent speakers left of Heiltsuk.

Heiltsuk is spoken in the villages of Bella Bella and Klemtu, both located on coastal islands in British Columbia not far from Bella Coola and Ocean Falls. Together with Oowekyala (spoken in Rivers Inlet), it forms Heiltsuk–Oowekyala, which, like neighbouring Haisla (spoken in Kitimaat) and Kwak'wala (in Alert Bay, Port Hardy, and various other settlements), is part of the Northern Wakashan language group. Some sources instead count Heiltsuk and Oowekyala as separate languages, which gives four Northern Wakashan languages. Heiltsuk has both conversational and ceremonial forms.

Varieties Heiltsuk has two main varieties. Speakers of four subdialects, , , and , live mainly in Bella Bella () and call their language or Heiltsuk. Speakers in Klemtu () call their language or Xai’xais. The two communities are ethnically distinct: most people in Klemtu share ancestry with the Kitasoo, a southern Tsimshianic people.

The two varieties differ in some vocabulary and in how often an epenthetic schwa is inserted, which happens more in Xai’xais. For example, 'day' is in Heiltsuk and in Xai’xais. However, there is no differences in tone between the varieties: speakers in Klemtu do not correct the tone of words in recordings and materials from Bella Bella, and there are no changes in tone in older recordings from either community.

Phonology Consonants The following is a chart of the consonants in Heiltsuk. BilabialAlveolarPalatalVelarUvularGlottalplainsib.lat.plainlab.plainlab.Plosive/Affricatetenuis aspirated ejective Fricative Sonorantplain glottalic The resonants in intervocalic forms function similarly to vowels, and so will be charted below.

Vowels There are three vowel phonemes in Heiltsuk, , which are written as , although nine other sounds are heard as allophones . Schwa is considered nearly always epenthetic. It has no mora, so it never carries stress or tone.

Some descriptions treat the letters as glottalized vowels. Howe (2004, 2005) and Janzen (2025) instead analyse them as a schwa followed by a glottalized resonant or a glottal stop, , and , which have no mora.

Syllable structure In Janzen's analysis, the mora, not the syllable, is the unit that carries stress and tone. A syllable has a mora if it contains a full vowel, or a schwa followed by a plain (non-glottalized) resonant in the coda. The syllabic resonants also have a mora. A schwa in an open syllable, a schwa followed by a glottalized resonant, and the glottalized syllabic resonants have no mora. + Syllable types Moraic Non-moraic CV, CVR Cə CəR CəˀR syllabic glottalized syllabic C = consonant; V = full vowel; R = plain resonant; ˀR = glottalized resonant.

The spelling does not show schwa. A dot below marks either a syllabic resonant or a schwa followed by the resonant, even when the two are in different syllables. In 'coho salmon', stands for and carries the high tone. When the clitic is added, the syllables change and the high tone moves to the vowel: .

A word can begin with a voiceless consonant that belongs to no syllable and has no schwa after it, as in 'person' and 'sasquatch'. This feature is shared with neighbouring Oowekyala and Nuxalk. The plural prefix copies only this first consonant, as in 'people'.

Syllabic resonants keep their mora before a vowel. In 'person there', the high tone is on and not on the following vowel. Such a resonant is then both the nucleus of its own syllable and the onset of the next.

When a word that ends in a full vowel takes a vowel-initial clitic, the final vowel can be reduced to a schwa and a resonant, and the resonant becomes the onset of the next syllable: 'raven', 'raven there'. After a spread high tone this does not happen; a glide or glottal stop is inserted instead, as in 'loon', 'loon there'.

Stress and tone Vowels and the syllabic resonants can take either high or low tone. High tone is written with an acute. Syllabic resonants are marked with a dot underneath (). Glottalized resonants may also be syllabic (), but may only take low tone. BilabialAlveolarLateralPalatalVelarGlottalvoicedconsonantal vocalichigh low glottalizedconsonantal vocaliclow The velar and glottal resonants are sometimes preaspirated.

According to Janzen (2025), earlier accounts by Rath (1985) and Howe (2004, 2005) treated tone as arising mostly from the sounds of a word, for example by tracing some low tones to an earlier glottalization. Janzen instead analyses Heiltsuk as a mixed tone–stress system, in which high pitch comes either from stress or from a tone that is part of a morpheme.

In this analysis, Heiltsuk has the stress rule of the other Northern Wakashan languages: stress falls on the leftmost mora (see Syllable structure) and is realized as high pitch. Unlike those languages, Heiltsuk does not place stress on the last syllable of a word with no mora; such a word has no high pitch. For example, 'sasquatch' has no high pitch, but 'sasquatch there' does. Some common function words, such as 'with' and 'at', never have high pitch.

Many morphemes, mostly roots but also some suffixes and clitics, also have a lexical tone pattern: /H/, /L/, /HL/ or /LH/. The last is rare. The tones of a root associate with morae from left to right, one tone per mora, and tones with no free mora are deleted. Stress then adds a high tone to the leftmost mora that has no tone. Morae with no tone have low pitch. A lexical high tone thus sounds the same as stress, and a lexical low tone sounds the same as a toneless mora. Adding the clitic 'there' shows the full pattern of a root:

+ Root tone patterns with 'there' Root tone Word IPA Pitch by mora Gloss none H L L 'goat there' /L/ L H L 'lake there' /H/ H H L 'music there' /HL/ H L H L 'rock there' In , for example, the root's /H/ and /L/ take the first two morae, and stress takes the third.

A high tone also spreads to the next mora across a plain resonant consonant, so 'story' has one high tone on two morae. Some words, such as 'work', do not show this spread.

Some suffixes have their own lexical tone, such as in 'go up'. The plural prefix, which copies the first consonant of the stem followed by , carries a high tone and removes all other lexical tones from the stem: 'rock there' becomes 'rocks there'.

Writing system Heiltsuk is written in modern times with the alphabet below, used by both the Heiltsuk and Kitasoo/Xaixais Nations. The letter is a rare spelling variant of . +Heiltsuk alphabetbpp̓dtt̓zcc̓sλƛƛ̓ɫgkk̓xgvkvk̓vxvǧvqvq̓vx̌vǧqq̓x̌mṃ́ṃm̓ṃ̓nṇ́ṇn̓ṇ̓lḷ́ḷl̓ḷ̓yíiy̓i̓wúuw̓u̓háah̓a̓ħʔ This orthography also sometimes uses a colon after a reduplicated first part of a word, as in 'to eat meat', 'to troll (repeatedly)' and 'Haíɫzaqv (plural)'. Not all sources write the colon: the revised spelling in Rath's alphabet guide gives 'to hunt for black bear', beside 'black bear'.

References

Bibliography

External links The Heiltsuk-Oweek'ala Language (YDLI) Bibliography of Materials on the Heiltsuk Language (YDLI) The Wakashan Languages Heiltsuk Nation Website Heiltsuk Tourism Website