Nisg̱a’a (Nishga)

Please download a Languagegeek.com font to view these pages properly.

Nisg̱a’a Keyboards are available

Text Example

The Nisg̱a’a language is spoken in north-western British Columbia, along the Nass river and surrounding lands. It is a member of the Tsimshian language family, most closely related to Gitksan – the two are often considered by linguists to be dialects of a combined Nass-Gitksan language; however the two are politically separate.

Note: There are several Roman Orthography conventionss on this site that may require further explanation. On the charts below, there is lots of phonetic terminology that may not be familiar to everyone.

This page uses no characters outside the Unicode standard.

The Canadian Census counts 1,090 Nisga’a speakers in 2006, up from from 915 in 2001. According to Howe and Cook, there are 700.

Community Names:

Not available yet.

Consonants

	bilabial	alveolar	alveolar affricate	lateral	palatal	velar	rounded velar	uvular	glottal
voiced stop	b	d	j			g	gw	g̱	’
voiceless stop	p	t	ts			k	kw	ḵ
ejective stop	p’	t’	ts’	tl’		k’	kw’	ḵ’
voiceless fricative			s	hl		x	xw	x̱	h
resonant	m	n		l	y		w
glottalised resonant	m̓	n̓		l̓	y̓		w̓

Vowels

	front	central	back
high	i - ii		u - uu
mid	e - ee		o - oo
low		a - aa

Notes

Long vowels are written double.

Last Update: February 23, 2008