Kwakʼwala or Kwak̓wala (/kwɑːˈkwɑːlə/),[2] previously known as Kwakiutl (/ˈkwɑːkjʊtəl/),[3] is a Wakashan language spoken by about 450 Kwakwakaʼwakw people around Queen Charlotte Strait in Western Canada.

While Kwakʼwala had no written records until European contact, archeological and linguistic evidence shed light on its prehistory.

[4] Northern Wakashan (or Kwakiutlan) speakers likely expanded outward from the north of Vancouver Island, displacing Salishan languages on the mainland of what is now British Columbia.

Kwakʼwala has suffixes marking the subject, object, and instrument within a phrase and spatial relationships including distance from and visibility to the speaker.

It is also phonologically complex, having a rich consonant inventory containing phonemes – being distinct sound units – uncommon in languages worldwide.

The use of Kwakʼwala declined significantly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly due to the assimilationist policies of the Canadian government, and above all the mandatory attendance of Kwakwaʼwakw children at residential schools.

Although Kwakʼwala and Kwakwakaʼwakw culture have been well-studied by linguists and anthropologists, the efforts did not reverse the trends leading to language loss.

[7] In August 2021 a Culture Camp for youth was launched in Bond Sound called Nawalakw or "Supernatural" in Kwakʼwala.

[10] In 2012, the Nuyumbalees Cultural Centre on Quadra Island received funding for shelving to display its collection of First Nations books for the benefit of Kwakʼwala speakers.

With funding from the nonprofit Mitacs, researchers Sara Child and Caroline Running Wolf have combined technology and indigenous pedagogy to provide multiple resources for learning Kwakʼwala.

As of 2022, they seek to use virtual or augmented reality along with text-to-speech software to create an immersive learning experience for Kwakʼwala learners.

They include a large phonemic inventory with a very rich array of consonantal contrasts and relatively few vowel phonemes, frequent use of a reduced vowel /ə/, contrastively glottalized sonorant consonants, the existence of ejectives at all places of articulation, and the presence of lateral affricates.

The consonantal inventory of Kwakʼwala includes a three-way airstream contrast in plosives (voiceless, voiced, and ejective).

Like its sister languages, Kwakʼwala morphology is notable for the complex effects that certain suffixes trigger or correlate with in the stems to which they affix.

There are two basic categories of changes associated with suffixes: fortition, or lenition, of a stem-final consonant, and expansion of stem material through vowel lengthening or reduplication.

Cells show the effect of suffixes belonging to the various classes (columns) on roots or stems of various shapes (rows).

However, all the class 2 suffixes described by Boas which productively apply to roots of type B or C leave stems unchanged rather than triggering lengthening.

Expansion of stems through suffixation is a central feature of the language, which transforms a relatively small lexicon of roots into a large and precise vocabulary.

Different linguistic analyses have grouped these suffixes into classes in various ways, including "formative" vs. "incremental" and "governing" vs. "restrictive".

(Boas 1947) rejects these morphosyntactic classifications and divides suffixes into various classes based mainly on semantic criteria.

A typologically notable feature of Kwakʼwala is the distinction made in verbal conjugation between visible and invisible subjects.

Verbal suffixes are shown in the following table: Because first and second person entities are always deictically accessible, there is no distinction between demonstrative and non-demonstrative clitics.

In the latter case, the instrumental -s attaches to the postnominal genitive ending on the possessed noun, and the prenominal suffix remains unchanged.

The rich morphological system of Kwakʼwala allows the expression of many features in a single predicate: ɢaɢakʼʲənt͡ɬut͡ɬ "I shall try to get you to be my wife"; ɬawadənt͡ɬasəkʲ "I have this one for my husband (lit.

In sentences with greater syntactic complexity, word order is identical to the order in which inflectional morphemes are added to a stem, stem/predicate-subject-direct object-instrument-direct object: kʷixidclubbed-ida-thebəɡʷanəmman-a-OBJ-χa-theqʼasasea otter-s-INSTR-is-histʼəlwaɢajuclubkʷixid -ida bəɡʷanəm -a -χa qʼasa -s -is tʼəlwaɢajuclubbed -the man -OBJ -the {sea otter} -INSTR -his clubThe man clubbed the sea-otter with his club.

The result is a systematic mismatch between syntactic and phonological constituent structure such that on the surface, each prenominal word appears to be inflected to agree with the following noun.

That can be seen in the preceding example: the sentence-initial predicate kʷixidida includes a clitic /-ida/, which belongs together with the nominal bəɡʷanəmaχa in terms of syntactical constituency.

He produced portions of the Book of Common Prayer in 1888 which was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).

A practical orthography, developed by the Kwakwakaʼwakw linguist David Grubb, became the standard system for writing Kwakʼwala.

Liqʼwala (also rendered Liq̓ʷala and Liḵʼwala), is an endangered dialect of Kwakʼwala spoken by the Laich-kwil-tach people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.