An endangered language, Shuswap is spoken mainly in the Central and Southern Interior of British Columbia between the Fraser River and the Rocky Mountains.

[1] Shuswap is the northernmost of the Interior Salish languages, which are spoken in Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

There are two dialects of Shuswap: The other Northern Interior Salish languages are Lillooet and Thompson.

[2] Many Indigenous languages, like Secwepemctsín, experienced rapid decline with the institution of the residential schools.

These schools prohibited the use of Indigenous languages in speech and in writing, resulting in two to three generations of students who were severely punished for not using English.

Although some children forced to attend these residential schools can still speak their mother tongue, they have experienced much trauma which has great negative consequences on the future generations.

Inter-generational transmission of Indigenous languages was severely disrupted due to the dominance of English in education and in the workplace.

[9] The Secwepemc Cultural Education Society released Nintendo DSi software in 2013 that teaches Secwepemctsin to young children.

[8][10] A language authority of ten elder fluent speakers, from East, West, and the North, are recording pronunciation.

[11] David Lacho, a University of British Columbia master's student, developed an augmented reality storybook app called Tuwitames, available on the Apple App Store,[12] to help people learn the Splatsin dialect of Secwepemctsín in support of the community's language revitalization initiatives.

[15][16] On January 21, 2013, Thompson Rivers University began offering a Secwepemctsín language class taught by fluent speaker Janice Billy.

The other system is based on one devised by Randy Bouchard of the British Columbia Language Project.

[19][20] These websites do not contain enough examples to show how all the automatic alternations are handled in the Bouchard style system.

The variation of sonorants between consonantal and vocalic pronunciations is automatic, and is not indicated in the Kuipers’ spelling system.

Although Kuipers (1974) does not specify, in many cases the glottalized or rounded version of a consonant seems to represent an allophonic variation.

However, glottalization can be contrastive (the root q’ey-, "set up a structure," versus q’ey’-, "write") or allophonic (the root q’ey- appears with a glottalized final consonant in s-t-q‘ey’-qn, "shed").

Resonants in the vocalic position are preceded by an automatic schwa, for example the word /stʼmkelt/ ("daughter"), pronounced [stɬʼəmkelt].

The environment around uvulars and velars produces a different set of variants, including occasional slight diphthongs.

Word order in Shuswap is relatively free; syntactical relationships are easily conveyed by the case marking system.