Morris Swadesh’, “Salish Internal Relationships”, International Journal of American Linguistics, year 1950, volume #16, pages 157-167 was the topic of an earlier blog post.
Here I present: Sheila Embleton (1985), “Lexicostatistics applied to the Germanic,Romance, and Wakashan families”, Word, volume 36, pages 37-60.
The “exponential decay function” of vocabulary in the Morris Swadesh’ method of Glottochronology’ is given BELOW. The decay constant ( λ, lambda) is equal to 19% vocabulary decay per millennium.
The cladogram of the Wakashan language family that Shelia Embleton computed is shown BELOW.
Here I presented: Sheila Embleton (1985), “Lexicostatistics applied to the Germanic,Romance, and Wakashan families”, Word, volume 36, pages 37-60.
SUMMARY.
Wakashan is a language family similar to Salish; and, Shelia Embleton applied the Swadesh Glottochronology’ method to Wakashan.
Wakashan languages are spoken in the Pacific Northwest of British Columbia, CANADA, and Washington, USA as shown BELOW.
The Wakashan languages consist of Northern and Southern branches, listed BELOW.
| Northern Wakashan |
| Nitinaht |
| Nootka |
| Makah |
| Southern Wakashan |
| Kwakiutl |
| Haisla |
| Heiltsuk |
COMMENTS.
The Wakashan are endangered languages, being spoken natively by about 350 people, out of an ethnic population of about 23,000 whose main language is English. However, there is a revitalization effort of Wakashan currently with 1,000 semi-speakers & learners.
