Okanagan, Colville-Okanagan, or ( or ) is a Salish language that originated among the Indigenous peoples of the southern Interior Plateau. It was primarily spoken in the Okanagan and Columbia River basins of present-day Canada and the United States in the precolonial era. Following British, American, and Canadian colonization during the 19th century and the subsequent forced assimilation of Salishan tribes, the use of the language declined significantly.
Colville-Okanagan is considered highly endangered. Approximately 50 fluent first language speakers remain, the majority of whom reside in British Columbia. The language is currently classified as moribund, with no first language speakers under the age of 50. Despite this, Colville-Okanagan remains the second-most spoken Salish language after Shuswap. Although it is rarely acquired as a first language, it is currently being learned as a second language by more than 40 adults and 35 children in Spokane, Washington, as well as by dozens of adults on the Colville Indian Reservation and within the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.
Colville-Okanagan descended from Proto Southern Interior Salish, a language originally spoken in the Columbia River Basin. Prior to European contact, the language had developed into three distinct dialects: Colville, Okanagan, and Lakes. These dialects exhibit a low degree of divergence, with variations primarily limited to minor differences in pronunciation rather than significant shifts in vocabulary or grammar.
The vast majority of the Colville-Okanagan lexicon is derived from Proto-Salish or Proto-Interior Salish. Some vocabulary is shared with or borrowed from neighboring Salish, Sahaptian, and Kutenai languages, while more recent loanwords have been adopted from English and French. Colville-Okanagan remained an exclusively oral language until the late 19th century, when missionaries and linguists began transcribing it to produce word lists, dictionaries, and grammars. Today, the language is written in Latin script using the American Phonetic Alphabet.
In the native tongue, the language is referred to as or . Historically, speakers occupied the northern Columbia Basin, ranging from the Methow River in the west to Kootenay Lake in the east, and extending north along the Columbia River, the Arrow Lakes, and the Slocan Valley. All -speaking bands are grouped under the ethnic label . This term is cognate of the Spokane-Kalispel word , which is the ethnonym for the Bitterroot Salish of Montana.
Colville-Okanagan is the heritage language of several groups, including:
Words in the language are traditionally not capitalized. This practice reflects Colville-Okanagan ethics; as noted by practitioners, capitalization can imply a hierarchy of importance that contradicts the egalitarian values of their society.
In 2012, the CBC reported on a family teaching Okanagan to their children at home. Seven nonprofit organizations currently support Okanagan language acquisition and revitalization:
Revitalization efforts in the United States include early childhood instruction and intensive adult speaker training. The Concentrated Tribes of the Colville Reservation actively promote preservation by allocating local and federal funds for cultural projects. The Tribes' primary objectives include establishing three language programs, developing comprehensive dictionaries, providing translation services, and maintaining regular language classes with 30 or more consistent participants.
The Salish School of Spokane (SSOS) () implements a comprehensive community revitalization strategy serving the Spokane metropolitan area. The school provides Okanagan immersion education for students ranging from one year old through the 9th grade. In classrooms for grades P-6, instruction is conducted entirely in Okanagan, covering core subjects such as mathematics, literacy, science, art, music and physical education. The curriculum is designed to foster full fluency by age 15, and students are expected to use the language exclusively while on campus. As of 2022, the school also provides intensive training for over 40 adults.
Twenty-eight staff members at SSOS are enrolled in the Salish Language Educator Development (SLED) program at SSOS. These staff members receive 90 minutes of immersion training daily as part of their work. Another 16 adults, parents of SSOS students, participate in paid afternoon and evening fluency track training. All SSOS parents commit to completing at least 60 hours of Okanagan language classes per year in order for their children to be eligible to attend the school. SSOS offers free, beginning language classes on evenings and weekends for SSOS parents and other community members. At Salish School of Spokane, there are 35 intergenerational pairs: 35 immersion school students who have at least one parent who is studying Okanagan in a fluency-track program.
Salish School of Spokane aims to increase the availability of educational material by maintaining a variety of audio resources and curricula to advance Okanagan revitalization. Along with these efforts, the school provides, develops and translates curricula. The Salish School works alongside organizations such as the Paul Creek Language Association, a nonprofit based in British Columbia, on the Curriculum Project. The Project aims to create foundational lesson plans from which language teachers can draw. The project is spearheaded by Christopher Parkin, and is translated primarily by the elder Sarah Peterson, with the additional help of Hazel Abrahamson and Herman Edwards.
The project is composed of six textbooks divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each level consists of a language book which contains a number of audio recordings, language, and learning software to ease language teaching. Additionally, each level includes a literature book. The literature book provides entertainment for language learners when outside of class and also reinforces sentence construction for Okanagan. The project also contains daily quizzes, midterm-style tests, and both oral and written final exams for evaluation. The curriculum developed by the Curriculum Project is available in electronic format online free of charge.
The Certificate of Aboriginal Language Revitalization is offered by the Centre in partnership with the University of Victoria, taught by linguist Maxine Baptiste. Additionally, the centre offers a certification to become a Certified Early Childhood Education Assistant in partnership with Nicola Valley Institute of Technology. The certificate does not qualify one to teach at the secondary level, but does ensure employability in daycare and pre-K. These certificates aim to give potential teachers easy access to college credits from centers of higher learning like the University of Victoria, and potential education assistants can be involved in childhood education, thus establishing fluency in Okanagan early on.
The Centre also emphasizes its college readiness programs; many native students perform poorly in school and the high school dropout rate for aboriginal high schoolers is very high.
Additionally, a "language house" was developed in 2015 in British Columbia aiming to create 10 fluent Okanagan speakers in four years. In this program, participants spend 2000 hours over four years learning via a variety of different teaching methods, regular assessments, frequent visits from Elders, and full immersion. Following completion of the program in 2020, the Language House intended to expand by developing more language houses across the Okanagan, increasing its goal to creating 100 new speakers in the 2020 cohort.
In 2011, the BC Indigenous Adult and Higher Learning Association, in collaboration with the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology and Centre, initiated a new bachelor's degree program â the Bachelor of Language Fluency (BNLF) â offered through the University of British Columbia Okanagan to support Okanagan language learning and create new fluent speakers. The program has been led by associate professor Jeannette Armstrong since its inception. The BNLF was the first bachelor's degree of Indigenous language fluency offered in Canada and was developed as a model that could be duplicated across British Columbia.
The Bachelor of Language Fluency is a four-year program. During the first two years, students complete an Indigenous language diploma. During the third and fourth year of the program, students are assigned a capstone project at UBCO where they work in the community to promote language learning.
The first cohort of eight students graduated with a Bachelor's of Language Fluency in 2023. An additional 12 students were expected to graduate the following year, with around 100 students working towards graduation at the time.
Okanagan alphabets are always unicase, with no capital letters.
The letters with acute accent , , , and are not counted as separate letters in this alphabet.
Consonant inventory of Okanagan:
The vowels found in Lakes are: , , , , and . Stress will fall only on the full vowels , , and in Okanagan.
The morphology of Okanagan is fairly complex. It is a head-marking language that relies mostly on grammatical information being placed directly on the predicate by means of affixes and clitics. The combination of derivational and inflectional suffixes and prefixes that are added onto the stem words make for a compact language.
Okanagan demonstrates great flexibility when dealing with persons, number, and gender. The language encodes the person via a series of prefixes and suffixes, and uses its number system in tandem with pluralized pronominals to communicate the number of actors within a sentence. For example:
In this example the - classification designates that the word contains a numeral classifier.
Additionally, Okanagan relies heavily on the use of suffixes to designate gender. Okanagan handles gender in much the same way, by attaching both determiner and âÂÂman' to the sentence, the gender of an object or subject can be communicated:
In this example, there is a combination of 2nd singular marker with 'wife'. 'She' is encoded into the meaning of the word via the inclusion of the gender suffix at the end of the sentence.
Person markers within Okanagan are attached to verbs, nouns, or adjectives. The marker used depending on transitivity of verbs and other conditions outlined below. The person maker used largely depends on the case being used in the sentence.
Absolutive markers within Okanagan can only be used if the predicate of the sentence is intransitive. For example, (I count) is perfectly viable in Okanagan, but * *(I count it) is not, because the verb 'count' is transitive. Person markers never occur without an accompanying intransitive verb.
Simple possessives within Okanagan are predominantly a result of prefixation and circumfixation on a verb. However, Okanagan uses simple possessives as aspect forms on the verb in very complex ways. This practice is predominantly seen in Southern interior Salish languages.
Where prefixation occurs with / in the 1st and 2nd person singular, may undergo deletion as below:
In the case of verbs, Okanagan morphology handles transitivity in various ways. The first is a set of rules for transitive verbs that only have a single direct object (monotransitive). For the ergative case, there are two variants of person markers: a stressed and an unstressed.
The stem: is the equivalent of the transitive verb 'count.'
(see it) is an example of a strong transitive past/present verb, with 'XX' identifying non-occurring combinations and '--' identifying semantic combinations which require the reflexive suffix .
There are two sets of verb affixes each containing two members that dictate the composition of a verb. The first set is composed of the affixes , and . The second set is composed of and where is a stressed vowel.
The major difference between two sets is how they incorporate affixes to remain grammatically correct. In the case of the , group, all particles and suffixes joining onto the stem and suffix of the verb will be identical for both. The affix connects to the stem of a transitive verb via suffixation. The suffix can only make reference to two persons: an actor and a primary goal.
(I write something)
The affix is the ditransitive counterpart of and works in much the same. The difference between the two is that it refers to three persons: an actor, and two other actors or goals. Furthermore, is further differentiated from its ditransitive cousin because it does not require a clitic to be a part of the verb.
In contrast to this group, and operate by unique rules. The affix, much like its counterpart must be added to a verb stem by means of suffixation, it is also transitive, and refers to an actor and a primary goal, but it implies a reference to a third person, or a secondary goal without explicitly stating it.
. (I write it [for myself])
The ditransitive affix shares all of the features of with the sole exception that it requires a clitic to be attached to front of the verb stem. The reason for the clitic in Okanagan is to add emphasis or focus on the second object, whereas makes no distinction.
Each clause in Okanagan can be divided into two parts: inflected predicates which are required for every sentence, and optional arguments. Okanagan allows a maximum of two arguments per sentence construction. These are marked by pronominal markers on the predicate. Each argument is introduced to the sentence via an initial determiner; the only exception to initial determiners is in the case of proper names which do not need determiners to introduce them. Predicates may be of any lexical category. There may be additional arguments added to a sentence in Okanagan via complementizers. Okanagan is unique among the majority of Salish languages for the inclusion of the complementizer.
Okanagan has one oblique marker that serves adapts it to several different functions depending upon the context in which it is used. The oblique marker can be used to mark the object of an intransitive verb, as in the case below.
may also mark the agent in a passive construction, and it may be used to mark the ergative agent of transitive verbs. Finally, the oblique may be used to mark functions including time and instrument:
may also coincide with the determiner in the case of instrumentals and passive agents:
There are a number of complements available to Okanagan to clarify its predicates; among these are positional complements, which merely indicate the place of a predicate, and a variety of marked complements, used to express further meaning through a series of particles.
The first of the marked complements is the prefix . For the most part, is an optional complement that is used in definite cases with the exception of cases when a proper noun is used. In such cases, the prefix is not allowed. When is used it refers to a definite referent.
"I saw the/those people." The sequential complements are composed of the particles and . conveys temporal sequence while represents a subordinate element.
"It's good if/that you come."
"It will be good when/after you come."
Okanagan also contains a number of locational complements which refer to when or where something happened, serving as a point of reference. The and the variant particles are used to tie a predicate to a time or place.
. "He went in the night"
Ablative complements in Okanagan come in the form of the particle. Along with directional complements, and , Okanagan speakers can indicate motion. The ablative complement only serves to indicate âÂÂmoving away from.' For instance, in the sentence below, the ablative is âÂÂfrom (across the ocean).'
"Were you saying [that he is] from Seattle?"
The directional complement's two particles represent both direction towards something, and direction towards a specific location. signifies movement towards something:
"to my house" (not towards it)
The particle modifies this sentence so that it specifies the house as the location to which the subject must move.
"To my house" (there specifically)
Verbs may react in multiple ways when a suffix is attached to the root stem of the word. Below are a number of ways in which intransitive roots are modified.
Transitives:
The Okanagan system relies heavily on its affixes to demonstrate tense, space, and time. Below are demonstrated various affixes that attach to roots to encode meaning.
The following two examples are only possible in the transitive paradigm:
unrealized action
"I'm going to look after him"
past perfect
"I've been looking after him."
The following examples are for intransitives.
Unrealized: expresses an intentional future action or state. (I am going to...)
" I'm warm"
Continuative: Action or state that is in progress
"I am celebrating"