Thompson (endonym: ) â also known as Nlakaüpamuctsin, Nlakaüpamux, or Nthlakampx â is an Interior Salishan language spoken by the Nlakaüpamux people (also known as the Thompson people). It is spoken in the Fraser Canyon, Thompson Canyon, and Nicola Country of the Canadian province of British Columbia and was formerly spoken in the North Cascades region of Whatcom and Chelan counties of Washington State in the United States. A dialect distinctive to the Nicola Valley is called Scwüexmx, which is the name of the subgroup of the Nlakaüpamux who live there.
Thompson is a consonant-heavy language. The consonants can be divided into two subgroups: obstruents, which restrict airflow, and sonorants or resonants, which do not. The sonorants are often syllabic consonants, which can form syllables on their own without vowels.
Stress is used with an acute accent; á.
One of the writing systems used for Thompson uses the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA) writing system.
The above consonant chart is based on the one found in "The Thompson Language" by Laurence C. Thompson & M. Terry Thompson.
Researchers working in the Generative tradition have speculated that Salishan languages lack lexical categories such as nouns and verbs. Evidence for such an absence of contrast between parts of speech in Thompson come from a lack of clear morphological markers (e.g., morphemes) that differentiate nouns and verbs. Instead, generative linguists discuss morphology and syntax in Salishan based on a framework of predicates and particles. However, more contemporary work suggests a changing understanding of Salishan grammar. Some Salishanists believe that functional categories are not prescriptive of lexical categories. Work in Functional linguistics suggests that other factors beyond morphological evidence code lexical categories in languages. In Salishan, the distinction would be less overt than in some other languages.
One morphological feature of Thompson is lexical suffixes. These are words that add nuance to predicates and can be affixed to the ends of root words to add their general meaning to that word. Thompson and Thompson assert that as a result of English language influence, speakers are using these more complex predicates less and less in favor of simpler predicates with complements and adjuncts, resulting in âÂÂa general decline in the exploitation of the rich synthetic resources of the language.âÂÂ