Secwepemctsín is probably the largest – in terms of speakers – Salishan language in the British Columbia interior. The people live along the upper Thompson River, and east all the way to just before the Alberta boundary. Please contact me if there are any mistakes or omissions on these pages.

There are two dialects as described in the Handbook, Eastern and Western. The Eastern dialect has several sounds absent from the Western, these will be placed in (parentheses) in the tables below. I have not found any information yet about which dialect is spoken in which community. A practical orthography has been developed, based on the Bouchard-style system which has been implemented for several B.C. languages. The description of the Eastern dialect in the Handbook is backed up by Connecting Traditions website.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventions on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.  

The Canadian Census counts 1,650 Shuswap speakers in 2006, up from from 1,255 in 2001. According to Howe and Cook, there are 600 speakers.

Community Names

Notes

• Stress is marked by an acute accent, á.
• In the Western dialect, there is no ejective /t̓/, and no lateral stop /tl/, so the symbol ‹t› does double duty: ‹t› is an alveolar stop, and ‹t̓› is a lateral ejective. The Eastern dialect differentiates between an alveolar and a lateral ejective, I assume /t̓/ is written ‹t̓› and /t̓l/ as ‹t̓l›.
• The Eastern dialect has the retroflex consonants /r/ and /t̓/, whereas in the Western dialect, they may be velar [ɣ]. The Connecting Traditions website sound clip is certainly retroflex, yet the print description on how to produce the sound is velar.
• In the Western dialects, /e/ is pronounced [ɛ~æ] when stressed, and [ǝ] otherwise. The Eastern dialect has both stressed and unstressed /e/, so the vowel glyphs had to be rearranged somewhat. The Connecting Traditions website gives Western dialect values to the vowels, although it states earlier that the dialect is Eastern. Either there is some confusion as to the phonetics on the site (supra /r/ and /r̓/), the front-/e/ and mid-/ǝ/ unstressed phonemes have merged in the Eastern dialect recently, or I have misunderstood something. Either way, I would greatly appreciate clarification.
• The digraphs ‹ts›, ‹ll›, and so on are single sounds, but these may be ambiguous with a combination of two sounds. So ‹gw› could be /gw/ or /g/ + /w/. I have seen a dot used to break up a series of two sounds which is written identically to a digraph. The text I saw used a period, but a mid·dot is a better typographical and technological choice.

Last Update: February 23, 2008