- Shasta language
language
name=Shasta
familycolor=American
states=United States
region=primarily northernCalifornia
extinct=by end of 20th century
fam1=Shastan
iso2=nai|iso3=shtThe Shasta language was a Shastan language spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. In 1980, only two fluent speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today the language is extinct, and all Shasta people now speak English.
ounds
Consonants
Length was distinctive for consonants in Shasta. The affricates were generally spelled
and <č>, and the ejective s indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme IPA|/j/ was spelled. Vowels
Shasta had four vowels, IPA|/i/ /e/ /a/ /u/, with contrastive length, and two tones: high tone, marked with an
acute accent , and low tone, which was unmarked.References
*Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
External links
* [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=sht Ethnologue report for Shasta]
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