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• 1 2025-05-29T14:41:14+00:00 PART 2 The SENĆOŦEN Alphabet and Sounds 1 plain 1410761 2025-05-29T14:41:14+00:00 The SENĆOŦEN alphabet was developed in the 1970’s by the late Dave Elliott, Sr., who was a native speaker of SENĆOŦEN from W̱JOȽEȽP. He realized that the language was endangered and that it was urgent that the remaining fluent speakers write down as much as they could, then teach it to the younger generations. His goal was to make a writing system that was logical, easy to learn, and easy to type. He wanted a system where one symbol represented one sound, so there would be no ‘sh’, ‘ch’, or ‘th’ as is used in English and some other Salishan languages. He also wanted a system where there would be no unusual characters like θ, ŋ, or ƛ̕ as in the standard phonetic alphabet used for many native North American languages.
  
  Dave Elliot recognized that all of the W̱SÁNEĆ people of younger generations were growing up speaking English, and they could all read and write English. So, to make it easier for the younger people to learn the writing, he based his alphabet on the English writing system. He taught the alphabet to other SENĆOŦEN speaking elders, who began teaching it to younger generations. The alphabet has been highly successful. It achieves Dave Elliott’s goal of being easy to learn and use. It also mostly achieves his goal of one symbol for one sound. While there are no cases of two symbols for one sound, like ‘th,’ the alphabet does contain cases of one symbol for two sounds. See the section on vowels and diphthongs for details.
  
  This is the SENĆOŦEN alphabetical order:

  A Á Ⱥ B C Ć Ȼ D E H I Í J K ₭ Ḵ Ḱ L Ƚ M N Ṉ O P Q S Ś T Ŧ Ⱦ Ṯ U W W̱ X X̱ Y

  The following describes the sounds (phonemes) represented by the letters of the alphabet. You can hear all of these example words in this section. These are recordings of W̱SÁNEĆ elders Elsie Claxton, Chris Paul, Ivan Morris, Manson Pelkey, Anne Jimmy, Ray Sam, Mary Jack, Lou Claxton, Lavina Charles, and Helen Jack. See Appendix A for a technical description of the sounds and their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents.