Shasta language

The origins of the term "Shasta" are vague; the Shasta called themselves "" (plain speakers). Peter Skene Ogden is the first recorded Euro-American to have used a variation of the term "Shasta", which he spelled "Sastise," "Castice," "Sistise," "Sarti," and "Sasty". ==Dialects==

According to Golla, there were four distinct dialects of Shasta: • (Oregon Shasta) • (Klamath River Shasta) • (Scott Valley Shasta) • (Shasta Valley Shasta) ==Phonology==

Consonants The length of a consonant distinguishes meaning in Shasta words. All stops, fricatives and nasals can occur as long or short in Shasta, but approximants only occur as short consonants. Minimal pairs and near minimal pairs are shown below: • a gnat vs. a board • nothing vs. wild sunflower • a person vs. cold Vowels Shasta has four vowels, , with contrastive length, and two tones: high and low. Tones Shasta vowels can have low or high tones. High tones are marked by an acute accent in the orthography devised by Silver (1966), whereas low tones are left unmarked. Examples for the vowel are given below: ==Orthography==

Silver (1966) devised a spelling system for distinguishing consonants and vowels in Shasta. Long phonemes are represented with the symbol following the character (e.g. and for and , respectively); ejectives are indicated by an apostrophe written over the character (e.g. for ). The phoneme is represented by , and the glottal stop is represented by the superscript IPA symbol . The letters are not used to represent Shasta sounds. ==References==