The Shasta language is an extinct Shastan language

Shastan languages

The Shastan family consisted of four languages, spoken in present-day northern California and southern Oregon.-Family division:# Konomihu # New River Shasta # Okwanuchu # Shasta ...

 formerly spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. It was spoken in a number of dialects, possibly including Okwanuchu

Okwanuchu language

-External links:* at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages...

. By 1980, only two fluent speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today, all surviving Shasta people speak English.

Consonants

		Bilabial	Dental	Palatal	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...		m	n
Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...	plain	p	t		k	ʔ
	ejective Ejective consonant In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants...	pʼ	tʼ		kʼ
Affricate Affricate consonant Affricates are consonants that begin as stops but release as a fricative rather than directly into the following vowel.- Samples :...	plain		ts	tʃ
	ejective		tsʼ	tʃʼ
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...			s		x	h
Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...			r
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...				j	w

Length is distinctive for consonants in Shasta. The affricates are generally written and <č>, and the ejectives indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme /j/ is represented by .

Vowels

Shasta has four vowels, /i e a u/, with contrastive length, and two tones

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

: high tone, marked with an acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

, and low tone, which is unmarked.

External links

• Shasta language overview at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
  Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
  The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California at Berkeley documents, catalogs, and archives the indigenous languages of the Americas...
  
  
• Ethnologue report for Shasta

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.