Saanich ( ) is the variety of North Straits Salish spoken by the Saanich people in the Pacific Northwest of North America. North Straits Salish is a dialect continuum, the varieties of which are closely related to the Klallam language.
Language revitalization efforts
"The Saanich people]] School Board, together with the
FirstVoices program for revitalizing Aboriginal languages, is working to teach a new generation to speak SENĆOŦEN" at the ȽÁU¸WELṈEW̱ Tribal School.
The first Grade 12 class is scheduled to graduate in June 2026.
SENĆOŦEN texting, mobile app and portal
A Saanich texting app was released in 2012.
A SENĆOŦEN
iPhone app was released in October 2011.
An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at the
First Voices SENĆOŦEN Community Portal.
Phonology
Vowels
Saanich has no rounded vowels in native vocabulary. As in many languages, vowels are strongly affected by uvular consonants.
Consonants
The following table includes all the sounds found in the North Straits dialects. No one dialect includes them all. Plosives are not aspirated, but are not voiced either. Ejectives have weak glottalization.
Montler (1986) originally described the (as well as their labialized and glottalic counterparts) as more fronted in their place of articulation than their typical IPA values, noting the velars to be articulated as pre-velar , and the uvulars as post-velar . However, later sources do not maintain this distinction, and simply describe them as velar and uvular.
Stress
Saanich stress is phonemic. Each full word has one stressed syllable, either in the root or in a suffix, the position of which is lexically determined. "
Secondary stress" is sometimes described, but this is merely a way of distinguishing lexical
(with "secondary stress", like all other vowels in a word) from
epenthesis schwas ("unstressed").
Orthography
The Saanich orthography was created by Dave Elliott in 1978, by using a typewriter to combine Latin characters with other marks to create new characters.
[ Dave Elliott and the SENÇOÎEN Alphabet] It is a
unicase alphabet, using only
uppercase letters with the single exception of a lower-case
s for the third person possessive suffix.
[Bill, Cayou & Jim (2003: 15)]
+SENĆOŦEN Orthography | Í |
| , |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
The glottal stop is written with a spacing cedilla , or less formally with a comma . It is omitted at the beginning of words, and may be ignored in other contexts. The comma was the original orthography, but caused problems with electronic document searches and the like; Saanich dictionaries, spell-check, and increasingly common usage have switched to the cedilla, and in 2025 Unicode defined the spacing cedilla as a letter to prevent word breaks, another problem with the comma.
The suffixing is used to indicate third-person possessive (as in English his, hers, theirs, its). Occasionally, a prefixing is written as lowercase and attached instead to a previous word. According to Montler (2018), it also may appear in the middle of a word for unknown reasons.
The vowel is usually written , unless it occurs next to a uvular consonant (), in which case it is written , and pronounced with a more open realization. The latter is rare in the language.
The glottal stop , glottalized sonorants , and suffixing are not included in alphabetization. On the other hand, the letter is included as the last letter of the alphabet, as can be seen on the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board's official SENĆOŦEN website.
often surfaces as when stressed, and this may be reflected in the orthography. For instance, is spelled Á¸'''Á¸L'''ȻEṈ rather than phonemic *Á¸'''ÁL¸'''ȻEṈ in the Saanich dictionary, and is '''O¸N'''XSET rather than *'''ON¸'''XSET .
Example text
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Unicode
In 2004, four letters from the Saanich alphabet were added to the Unicode standard,
and the barred K was accepted in 2024.
[ L2/24-234r, pp. 6, 14-15]
In 2025, the properties of the spacing cedilla were changed to accommodate Saanich.
[ Unicode® Standard Annex #29 - Unicode Text Segmentation]
Grammar
Metathesis
In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most commonly translated into English using the
be +
-ing progressive construction. It is formed from the “nonactual” verb form through a CV → VC metathesis process, in which the consonant and vowel switch positions.
|
| ŦX̱ÉT 'shove' (nonactual) | → | ŦÉX̱T 'shoving' (actual) |
| ṮPÉX̱ 'scatter' (nonactual) | → | ṮÉPX̱ 'scattering' (actual) |
| ȾȽÉQ 'pinch' (nonactual) | → | ȾÉȽQ 'pinching' (actual) |
Notes
Bibliography
-
Marianne Mithun. (1999). The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (hbk); .
-
(Web version of the author's PhD dissertation, University of Hawaiʻi).
-
Montler, Timothy. (1996). Languages and Dialects in Straits Salishan. Proceedings of the International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages, 31, 249–256.
-
Montler, Timothy. (1999). Language and Dialect Variation in Straits Salishan. Anthropological Linguistics, 41 (4), 462–502.
-
Montler, Timothy. (2018). SENĆOŦEN: A Dictionary of the Saanich Language. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
-
Thompson, Laurence; Thompson, M. Terry; & Efrat, Barbara. (1974). Some Phonological Developments in Straits Salish. International Journal of American Linguistics, 40, 182–196.
-
YELḰÁTȾE Claxton,; & STOLȻEȽ Elliot,. (1994). Reef Net Technology of the Saltwater People. Brentwood Bay, B.C.: Saanich Indian School Board.
External links
