Dictionary of Upriver Halkomelem (review)

Upriver Halkomelem (UH) is one of three major dialects of Halkomelem, a Salishan language traditionally spoken in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. The Upriver dialect is the ancestral language of the Stó:lō people and is known to them as Halq’émeylem or Stó:lō Halq’eméylem.

Galloway’s publication of his new dictionary of UH provides an excellent window into this severely endangered language. The dictionary will greatly benefit the growing number of community members interested in learning the language, while at the same time serving as a valuable resource for researchers in a number of areas. It is extensive and extremely accurate; in draft form, it has seen many years of use in community work, and it is a pleasure to see it available in its finished form.

This dictionary will first and foremost be of use to those of us working at the community level to learn and revitalize the UH language, especially as a tool for developing curriculum materials. Galloway’s attention both to words relating to modern living (e.g., shxwth’ámqels ‘scissors’, or kalipōli ‘California’) and to those for traditional practices (e.g., le x éywa ‘to spear animals by torchlight’) very effectively meets the needs of a community working towards language revitalization.

Galloway’s dictionary also provides extensive examples and some explanation for various topics of interest to general linguists. For instance, UH contains a variety of complex, interacting reduplicative processes; each is described with many examples. It is the only Salishan language to have developed tone or tonelike characteristics, apparently related to a historical loss of certain glottal and glottalized segments; tone patterns are marked for each word. Like all Salishan languages, UH contains more than a hundred suffixes for body parts, tools, and other functions; these “lexical suffixes” act something like a noun-classifier system, similar but not identical to noun incorporation, and this system is also covered with many examples. And—again like all Salishan languages—UH contains a set of around two thousand roots that are each used in multiple morphologically complex forms; the root system is clearly and explicitly laid out, and as we will see is central to the organization of this dictionary.

American Indian specialists will, of course, also find in the dictionary a rich source of data for historical reconstruction and typological comparisons, some of which Galloway addresses in his comments. He is also very interested in seeing the language in terms of its own system of categories, and, to this end, he introduces a complex system of semantic fields for categorizing the entries; for example, he classes language-related words as “LANG,” and words related to spirit power as “POW.” These categories are at least partly—and I think rightly—designed to help us see connections between the language and Salishan culture, making this also a work relevant to anthropological linguistics.

Our familiarity with dictionaries for European languages, focused on entries for words organized alphabetically, may make us forget that this structure is based on a series of decisions about how dictionary organization should best reflect the language; to his credit, Galloway has not simply imported this model, but instead has thought in a fundamental way about what organization best reflects the structure of UH.

The English-to-UH part of the dictionary does the simple word-based organization (though these entries also indicate the UH root, an excellent decision). But Galloway employs a much more complex structure in the UH-to-English part, which includes four distinct types of interconnected entries. Entries for words are similar to the European model, showing items at varying levels of morphological complexity (but again also, rightly, indicating the root wherever possible). But besides word entries, Galloway, as Kuipers did in his dictionary of Squamish (1967, 1969), includes a separate entry for each root, each containing many examples of words built with the root; in effect, this creates a root-based...