Saanich dialect

"The School Board, together with the FirstVoices program for revitalizing Aboriginal languages, is working to teach a new generation to speak " at the ȽÁU¸WELṈEW̱ Tribal School. The first Grade 12 class is scheduled to graduate in June 2026. SENĆOŦEN texting, mobile app and portal A Saanich texting app was released in 2012. A SENĆOŦEN iPhone app was released in October 2011. An online dictionary, phrasebook, and language learning portal is available at the First Voices SENĆOŦEN Community Portal. ==Phonology==

Vowels Saanich has no rounded vowels in native vocabulary. As in many languages, vowels are strongly affected by uvular consonants. Consonants The following table includes all the sounds found in the North Straits dialects. No one dialect includes them all. Plosives are not aspirated, but are not voiced either. Ejectives have weak glottalization. Montler (1986) originally described the dorsal consonants (as well as their labialized and glottalic counterparts) as more fronted in their place of articulation than their typical IPA values, noting the velars to be articulated as pre-velar , and the uvulars as post-velar . However, later sources do not maintain this distinction, and simply describe them as velar and uvular. This includes an updated description from Montler (2018), noting the velars as equivalent to English counterparts, and the uvulars as having the tongue backed toward the uvula. Stress Saanich stress is phonemic. Each full word has one stressed syllable, either in the root or in a suffix, the position of which is lexically determined. "Secondary stress" is sometimes described, but this is merely a way of distinguishing lexical schwas (with "secondary stress", like all other vowels in a word) from epenthetic schwas ("unstressed"). ==Orthography==

The Saanich orthography was created by Dave Elliott in 1978, by using a typewriter to combine Latin characters with other marks to create new characters. It is a unicase alphabet, using only uppercase letters with the single exception of a lower-case '''''' for the third person possessive suffix. The glottal stop is written with a spacing cedilla , or less formally with a comma . It is omitted at the beginning of words, and may be ignored in other contexts. The comma was the original orthography, but caused problems with electronic document searches and the like; Saanich dictionaries, spell-check, and increasingly common usage have switched to the cedilla, and in 2025 Unicode defined the spacing cedilla as a letter to prevent word breaks, another problem with the comma. The suffixing is used to indicate third-person possessive (as in English his, hers, theirs, its). Occasionally, a prefixing is written as lowercase and attached instead to a previous word. According to Montler (2018), it also may appear in the middle of a word for unknown reasons. It is not included as part of the alphabet in Montler (2018)'s dictionary. Example text Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Unicode In 2004, four letters from the Saanich alphabet were added to the Unicode standard, and the barred K was accepted in 2024. In 2025, the properties of the spacing cedilla were changed to accommodate Saanich. ==Grammar==

Metathesis In Saanich, metathesis is used as a grammatical device to indicate "actual" aspect. The actual aspect is most commonly translated into English using the be + -ing progressive construction. It is formed from the “nonactual” verb form through a CV → VC metathesis process, in which the consonant and vowel switch positions. ==Notes==