Saanich (also Sənčáθən, written as SENĆOŦEN in Saanich orthography and pronounced ) is the language of the First Nations Saanich people in the Pacific Northwest region of northwestern North America. Saanich is a Coast Salishan language in the Northern Straits dialect continuum, the varieties of which are closely related to the Klallam language.

Language revitalization efforts

"The W̱SÁNEĆ 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.

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 post-velar 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. The dentals are often written ⟨θ⟩, ⟨tθʼ⟩, but this is inaccurate, as they are laminal sibilants,, and are only rarely interdental. The alveolars, on the other hand, are apical, as are all alveolars, including the laterals. The post-velars are often written ⟨q⟩, ⟨χ⟩, etc., but are not actually 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 schwas (with "secondary stress", like all other vowels in a word) from epenthetic schwas ("unstressed").

Writing system

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. It is a unicase alphabet, using only uppercase letters with the single exception of a lower-case s for the third person pos****ses****sive suffix. The glottal stop is not always indicated**,** but may be written with a spacing cedilla: ¸****, or less formally with a comma: ,. When distinguished, the glottalized resonants are ⟨L¸ M¸ N¸ Ṉ¸ U¸ Y¸⟩. The vowel is usually written Á, unless it occurs next to a post-velar consonant, where it is written A.

Example text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Unicode

In 2004, four characters from the SENĆOŦEN orthography were added to the Unicode standard.

Grammar

Metathesis

In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most often translated into English as a be …-ing progressive. The actual aspect is derived from the "nonactual" verb form by a CV → VC metathesis process (i.e. consonant metathesizes with vowel).