Kootenai language
| Kutenai | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Canada, United States |
| Region | British Columbia, Montana, Idaho |
| Ethnicity | 1,510 Ktunaxa (2000 census – 2014) |
|
Native speakers
|
31 (2002–2014) |
| Latin script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | kut |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kute1249 |
Kutenai language
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The Kutenai language (English: /ˈkuːtəneɪ, -tneɪ, -ni/), also Kootenai, Kootenay and Ktunaxa, is named after and is spoken by some of the Kutenai people Native American/First Nations, indigenous to the area of North America that is now Montana and Idaho, United States, and British Columbia, Canada. It is a language isolate, unrelated to the Salishan family of languages spoken by neighboring tribes on the coast and in the interior Plateau. Alongside, they also speak ʾa·qanⱡiⱡⱡitnam 'Ktunaxa Sign Language'.
Kutenai is a language isolate. There have been attempts to place Kutenai in either a Macro-Algonquian or Macro-Salishan language family, most recently with Salish, but they have not been generally accepted as proven.
Like other languages in the area, Kutenai has a rich inventory of consonants and a small inventory of vowels. But, there are other allophones of the three basic phonemic vowels. The lack of a phonemic distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is much like other languages of the area. Due to Kutenai's location on the periphery of this linguistic area, the loss of a rich lateral inventory is consistent with other nearby languages, which now have only one or two lateral consonants. One such language group contains the Sahaptian languages, which have had a similar loss of laterals. Nez Perce has /ts/, believed to be the lateral affricate in the proto-language. Nez Perce, like Kutenai, lies in the eastern periphery of the Northwest Linguistic area.
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