| Also Known As: Shastan,Sastean
Description:
The Shasta language was a Shastan language spoken from northern California into southwestern Oregon. In 1980, only two fluent speakers, both elderly, were alive. Today the language is extinct, and all Shasta people now speak English.
Length was distinctive for consonants in Shasta. The affricates were generally spelled and , and the ejectives indicated by an apostrophe written over the character. The phoneme /j/ was spelled .
Shasta had four vowels, /i/ /e/ /a/ /u/, with contrastive length, and two tones: high tone, marked with an acute accent, and low tone, which was unmarked...... full article at Wikipedia |