©2025 Honourably Taught Consulting
Squamish Language
Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Sníchim
Published in 2011
"Ta Sḵwx̱ú7mesh sníchim is an independant lanuage that belongs to the Salish Language Family. Historically there were 23 Salish languages. These languages were spoken in Southern British Columbia, throughout Washington State, on the Oregon Coast, and into Idaho and Montana. The whole Salish Language family consists of five branches (Bella Coola, Coast Salish, Tsamosan, Tillamook, Interior Salish)... a branch of language means that these languages share many things in common compared to another branch in the language family...There are 10 languages in the Coast Salish branch (Comox\Sliammon, Pentlach, Sechelt, Squamish, Halkomelem, Nooksack, Straights <Saanich, Samich, Lummi>, Clallam, Lushootseed and Twana." page xiv
There is a lot of documented history if our language starting in the 1800’s in conjunction with roaming anthropologists who were studying people. People such as Franz Boas, Charles Hill-Tout, Homer Barnett and linguist Aert H. Kuipers. Kuipers wrote the first comprehensive grammar of Squamish Language.
Our Nation has participated in a lot of language documentation, language reclamation and language revitalization work also. Starting in the 1960’s one of our language speakers Late Dr.Louis Miranda worked exclusively with Aert H Kuipers and then work carried forward from there on to document a lot of our language into audio files. There is a lot of behind the scene language work with our ever evolving Squamish Nation workplace and elected Squamish Nation council.
A large project that begin the documentation of our language and neighbours communities was the BC Native Language Project with Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy. Then in 1980 our Chief and Council adopted the writing system you see in our dictionary. This lead to the creation of "How to write the Squamish Language" and "simple sentences" books.
And from there much has happened in different areas of our community, including the graduate of our own Dr and Squamish Linguist. He played a large role in the publishing of our dictionary among many other Squamish Language Initiatives.