Kwakʼwala or Kwak̓wala (),Laurie Bauer, 2007, The Linguistics Student's Handbook, Edinburgh previously known as Kwakiutl (), is a Wakashan language spoken by about 150 Kwakwakaʼwakw people around Queen Charlotte Strait on the coast of British Columbia. It has shared considerable influence with other languages of the Pacific Northwest, especially those of the unrelated Salishan family. While Kwakʼwala is classified as critically endangered according to UNESCO, revitalization efforts are underway to preserve the language.
While Kwakʼwala had no written records until European contact, archeological and linguistic evidence shed light on its prehistory. Northern and Southern branches of the Wakashan language family split approximately 2,900 years ago.Fortescue, Michael. Drift and the Grammaticalization Divide between Northern and Southern Wakashan. International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 72, No. 3 (July 2006), pp. 295- 324. Northern Wakashan (or Kwakiutlan) speakers likely expanded outward from the north of Vancouver Island, displacing Salishan languages on the mainland of what is now British Columbia. Kwakʼwala was first written by missionaries during the colonization of the Pacific Northwest. As part of its policy of forced cultural assimilation of indigenous peoples, the Canadian government suppressed Kwakʼwala and outlawed its attendant culture through the late 19th to mid-20th centuries; as of the early 21st century, elders and second-language learners are currently rebuilding its speaking population.
Kwakʼwala has complex word formation, featuring a polysynthetic morphology that is almost exclusively suffixing like other Wakashan languages. Its verbs feature suffixes for mood, aspect, and person, with multiple of these meanings often existing in a single suffix. Kwakʼwala's nouns feature case suffixes marking the subject, object, and instrument within a phrase, as well as spatial relationships including distance from and visibility to the speaker. These suffixes can trigger consonant mutation in the stem which they inflect. It is also phonologically complex; its rich consonant inventory contains phonemes that are cross-linguistically uncommon. As a part of the Pacific Northwest sprachbund, Kwakʼwala shares many typological features in common with indigenous languages of that region.
History
The use of Kwakʼwala declined significantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to the assimilationist policies of the Canadian government, and above all the mandatory attendance of Kwakwaʼwakw children at residential schools in the Indian Act, 1920 s.10(1). Although Kwakʼwala and Kwakwakaʼwakw culture have been well-studied by linguists and anthropologists, the efforts did not reverse the trends leading to language loss. According to Guy Buchholtzer, "The anthropological discourse had too often become a long monologue, in which the Kwakwakaʼwakw had nothing to say." As a result of these pressures, there are relatively few Kwakʼwala speakers today, and most remaining speakers are past the age of child-raising, which is considered crucial for language transmission. As with many other indigenous languages, there are significant barriers to language revitalization.
However, a number of revitalization efforts have recently attempted to reverse language loss for Kwakʼwala. A proposal to build a Kwakwakaʼwakw First Nations Centre for Language Culture has gained wide support. In August 2021 a Culture Camp for youth was launched in Bond Sound called Nawalakw or "Supernatural" in Kwakʼwala. The project's goal is to revitalize the language, and to be a place where Kwak̓wala is spoken fluently by community members of all ages. A review of revitalization efforts in the 1990s shows that the potential to fully revitalize Kwakʼwala still remains, but serious hurdles also exist.Reversing Language Shift: Can Kwakʼwala Be Revived? The language is taught at The Uʼmista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, British Columbia. In 2012, the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre on Quadra Island received funding for shelving to display its collection of First Nations books for the benefit of Kwakʼwala speakers.
A Kwakʼwala iPhone app was released in December 2011. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at the First Voices Kwakʼwala Community Portal. The Kwakwala Bible Portions were put online by the Canadian Bible Society in 2020.
With funding from the nonprofit Mitacs, researchers Sara Child and Caroline Running Wolf have combined technology and indigenous pedagogy to provide multiple resources for learning Kwakʼwala. As of 2022, they seek to use virtual or augmented reality along with text-to-speech software to create an immersive learning experience for Kwakʼwala learners.
Dialects
The (meaning "speakers of Kwakʼwala") are an ethnic group comprising multiple tribes sharing the Kwakʼwala language. However, the Kwakʼwala spoken by each tribe exhibits often significant dialectal differences. There are four major unambiguous dialects of Kwakʼwala: , , and .Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw/Kʷakʷəkəw̓akʷ Communities
In addition to those dialects, there are also Kwakwakaʼwakw tribes that speak . has sometimes been considered to be a dialect of Kwakʼwala and sometimes a separate language. The standard orthography for is quite different from the most widely used orthography for Kwakʼwala.
Phonology Kwakʼwala phonology exhibits many traits of the Northwest Coast Sprachbund of which it is a part. They include a large phonemic inventory with a very rich array of consonantal contrasts and relatively few vowel phonemes, frequent use of a reduced vowel //, contrastively glottalized sonorant consonants, the existence of ejectives at all places of articulation, and the presence of lateral affricates.
Consonants The consonantal inventory of Kwakʼwala includes a three-way contrast in plosives (voiceless, voiced, and ejective). There is an extensive series of distinctions between rounded and non-rounded consonants in the dorsal region. Notably, there are no velar consonants without secondary articulation: they are all either palatalized or labialized. The consonants are shown in the following table.
+ Consonants Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal median sibilant lateral pal. lab. plain lab. Plosive/Affricate voiceless voiced ejective Fricative Sonorant plain glottalized
Vowels The vowels of Kwakʼwala are . There is a phonemic length distinction as well; however, not all vowels exist in both long and short versions. The phonemic status of some of the vowels in question is relatively unclear, as especially evident in the case of and . They often interchange in different instances of the same stem or suffix, depending on the phonological content.
presents some cases of complementary distribution between and but concludes that those vowels must be underlyingly distinct in some other cases. analyzes that only the vowels and are phonemic, with the remaining ones being allophonic: from ; from ; from ; and from .
Suprasegmentals Stress placement depends on syllable weight. A syllable is heavy if it has a long vowel or a moraic coda; otherwise it is light. A moraic coda is a non-glottalized sonorant. Thus, counts as a heavy syllable, while is light . If a word has any heavy syllables, primary stress falls on the leftmost heavy syllable. Otherwise, primary stress falls on the rightmost syllable.
Secondary stress also occurs, but its distribution is less well understood. According to , secondary stress falls on the second syllable following the primary stress and iteratively thereafter on every second syllable. This statement may be amended to take into account the observation of that epenthetic vowels never bear stress, including secondary stress, and they seem to be invisible when syllables are counted for the assignment of secondary stress.
Kwakʼwala appears to have an otherwise unattested pattern of repair strategies for coda condition violations. Underlyingly voiced consonants are devoiced word-finally but surface faithfully with following epenthesis when they are word-internal. Glottalized consonants remain glottalized when word-final but surface with a following epenthetic vowel when they are word-internal .
Morphophonology
Kwakʼwala has a rich morphological system which, like other Wakashan languages, is entirely suffixing (except for reduplication). Like its sister languages, Kwakʼwala morphology is notable for the complex effects that certain suffixes trigger or correlate with in the stems to which they affix. There are two basic categories of changes associated with suffixes: fortition, or lenition, of a stem-final consonant, and expansion of stem material through vowel lengthening or reduplication.
Hardening and weakening
Suffixes fall into three classes according to their behaviour: weakening, hardening, and neutral. Weakening and hardening suffixes alter the stem to which they attach by changing the features of the stem-final consonant. Following the Boasian orthographic tradition, the suffix types are indicated by a symbol preceding the suffix: ⟨-⟩, ⟨=⟩ or ⟨-!⟩, respectively.
Weakening suffixes trigger lenition in some cases. Plain voiceless stops and affricates are changed to their voiced equivalent. The behaviour of fricatives is somewhat less systematic. The sibilant alternates with or , depending on the root. The velar alternates with . Both and alternate with , but does not change in a weakening context. The lateral alternates with both and . Sonorants weaken by becoming glottalized.
In addition to the somewhat unpredictable set of changes, the patterns involved in weakening are further complicated by the fact that some suffixes weaken stops but do not affect fricatives. Boas lists 11 suffixes weakening stops and affricates but not fricatives; these suffixes are indicated by the notation ⟨=⟩ as seen in the following list: /=/ "continuously"; /=/ "mouth, opening, to talk about"; /=/ "away"; /=/ or /=/ "to do something while doing something else" – weakens ; (=) "continuing motion in a definite direction" – weakens , , ; (=) "to go attend, to be on the way"; /=/ "place where there are many (plants etc.)" – does not weaken ; /=/ "canoe"; /=/ "in front of house, body, mountain"; /=/ "by force"; /=/ "moving on water".
Hardening suffixes trigger fortition in most cases. Stem-final plain stops or affricates or sonorants become glottalized. As with weakening suffixes, the hardening patterns of fricatives are less predictable. hardens to or . (The classification is apparently arbitrary and not necessarily consistent with the weakening behavior of a given stem; a stem in which becomes when weakened may become either or when it is hardened, etc.) hardens to . Both and harden to , while in a hardening context surfaces with an additional following glottal stop: . hardens to .
The table below illustrates how various roots weaken and harden.
RootWeakeningHardeningMeaning 'pinch' 'man' paddle
Stem expansion
In addition to fortition and lengthening, suffixes may also be associated with lengthening or reduplication effects on the stems which precede them. distinguishes seven classes of suffix (with many subclasses), which all have different effects on some of the twenty possible root shapes which he identifies: