For instance the Nuxalk word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]), meaning "he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant",[2] has twelve obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels.

Salishan languages are most commonly written using the Americanist phonetic notation to account for the various vowels and consonants that do not exist in most modern alphabets.

In contrast to classifications made by linguistic scholars, many Salishan groups consider their particular variety of speech to be a separate language rather than a dialect.

[citation needed]Languages or dialects with no living native speakers are marked with † at the highest level.

This proposal persists primarily through Sapir's stature: with little evidence for such a family, no progress has been made in reconstructing it.

[citation needed] The syntax of Salish languages is notable for its word order (verb-initial), its valency-marking, and the use of several forms of negation.

There is no case marking, but central noun phrases will often be preceded by determiners while non-central NPs will take prepositions.

Some Salishan languages are ergative, or split-ergative, and many take unique object agreement forms in passive statements.

Applicative affixes seem to be present on the verb when the direct object is central to the event being discussed, but is not the theme of the sentence.

The most common pattern involves a negative predicate in the form of an impersonal and intransitive stative verb, which occurs in sentence initial position.

An almost identical pair of sentences from St’át’imcets demonstrates that this phenomenon is not restricted to Lushootseed.

This and similar behaviour in other Salish and Wakashan languages has been used as evidence for a complete lack of a lexical distinction between nouns and verbs in these families.

The different speech communities have interacted a great deal, making it nearly impossible to decipher the influences of varying dialects and languages on one another.

However, there are several trends and patterns that can be historically traced to generalize the development of the Salishan languages over the years.

The variation between the Salishan languages seems to depend on two main factors: the distance between speech communities and the geographic barriers between them.

Salishan language communities that have demonstrated change in technology and environmental vocabulary have often remained more consistent with their religious terminology.

Religion and heavily ingrained cultural traditions are often regarded as sacred, and so are less likely to undergo any sort of change.

Indeed, cognate lists between various Salishan languages show more similarities in religious terminology than they do in technology and environment vocabulary.

In some cases these taboo words are permanently replaced by their chosen descriptive phrases, resulting in language change.

Stanley Evans has written a series of crime fiction novels that use Salish lore and language.

In the video game Life Is Strange, the Salish lore was used on certain history of Arcadia Bay as totem poles are seen on some areas, including a segment from the first episode of its prequel involving the raven.