Cowlitz language
The Cowlitz language is a member of the Tsamosan branch of the Coast Salish family of Salishan languages.
| Cowlitz | |
|---|---|
| Native to | United States |
| Region | Southwestern Washington |
| Ethnicity | 200 Cowlitz people (1990)[1] As of 2019 over 2,000 and growing |
| Extinct | maybe 2 speakers in 1990.[1] 1 currently lives in Puyallup, Washington |
| Revival | the 110 listed in 2010 census[2] are not native speakers |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | cow |
| Glottolog | cowl1242[3] |
The Cowlitz people
The Cowlitz people were originally two distinct tribes: the Lower Cowlitz and the Upper Cowlitz. Only the Lower Cowlitz spoke Cowlitz; the Upper Cowlitz, a Sahaptin tribe, spoke a dialect of Yakama.
Vocabulary
Cowlitz is most similar to Lower Chehalis, another Tsamosan language, although it does contains some oddities, such as the word for one, utsus (in contrast to the Lower Chehalis paw).
| English | Cowlitz |
|---|---|
| Lower Cowlitz tribe | Sł'púlmš |
| one (number) | utsus |
| two | salli |
| three | kałi |
| four | mus |
| five | tsilats |
| to sing | ilani |
| moon/sun | Łuqał |
| dog | kaxa |
| water | kal'l |
| man | siłimx |
| woman | kuwił |
References
- Cowlitz at Ethnologue (14th ed., 2000).
- Cowlitz at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Cowlitz". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- Native-Languages.org.
- Kinkade, Dale. Cowlitz Dictionary And Grammatical Sketch. Missoula: University of Montana Press, 2004.
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