Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth.
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.
Chemakum is an extinct Chimakuan language once spoken by the Chemakum, a Native American group that once lived on western Washington state's Olympic Peninsula. It was closely related to the Quileute language, also extinct but undergoing revitalization in the early 21st century. In the 1860s, Chief Seattle and the Suquamish people killed many of the Chimakum people. In 1890, Franz Boas found out about only three speakers, and they spoke it imperfectly, of whom he managed to gather linguistic data from one, a woman named Louise Webster. Several years later in the 1920s, Manuel J. Andrade cross-checked some of Boas' materials with the same speaker. A few semi-speakers continued until the 1940s on the east side of the Olympic Peninsula, between Port Townsend and Hood Canal.
The Maidu are a Native American people of northern California. They reside in the central Sierra Nevada, in the watershed area of the Feather and American Rivers and in Humbug Valley. In Maiduan languages, maidu means "man".
Washo is an endangered Native American language isolate spoken by the Washo on the California–Nevada border in the drainages of the Truckee and Carson Rivers, especially around Lake Tahoe. While there are only 20 elderly native speakers of Washo, since 1994 there had been a small immersion school that has produced a number of moderately fluent younger speakers. The immersion school has since closed its doors and the language program now operates through the Cultural Resource Department for the Washoe Tribe. The language is still very much endangered; however, there has been a renaissance in the language revitalization movement as many of the students who attended the original immersion school have become teachers.
The Tlingit language is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada and is a branch of the Na-Dene language family. Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and culture.
Dahalo is an endangered Cushitic language spoken by around 500–600 Dahalo people on the coast of Kenya, near the mouth of the Tana River. Dahalo is unusual among the world's languages in using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language: clicks, implosives, ejectives, and pulmonic consonants.
Caddo is a Native American language, the traditional language of the Caddo Nation. It is critically endangered, with no exclusively Caddo-speaking community and as of 2023 only two speakers who had acquired the language as children outside school instruction, down from 25 speakers in 1997. Caddo has several mutually intelligible dialects. The most commonly used dialects are Hasinai and Hainai; others include Kadohadacho, Natchitoches and Yatasi.
Ch is a digraph in the Latin script. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Chamorro, Old Spanish, Czech, Slovak, Igbo, Uzbek, Quechua, Ladino, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Ukrainian, Japanese, Latynka, and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. Formerly ch was also considered a separate letter for collation purposes in Modern Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes in Polish; now the digraph ch in these languages continues to be used, but it is considered as a sequence of letters and sorted as such.
Eastern Pomo, also known as Clear Lake Pomo, is a nearly extinct Pomoan language spoken around Clear Lake in Lake County, California by one of the Pomo peoples.
Maiduan is a small endangered language family of northeastern California.
Maidu, also Northeastern Maidu or Mountain Maidu, is an extinct Maiduan language of California, United States. It was spoken by the Maidu peoples who traditionally inhabit the mountains east and south of Lassen Peak in the American River and Feather River basins. These river regions include such valleys in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains of California as: Indian Valley, American Valley, Butte Valley, and Big Meadows. Maidu may also refer to the related Konkow and Nisenan languages.
The Konkow language, also known as Northwest Maidu is a part of the Maiduan language group. It is spoken in California. It is severely endangered, with three remaining elders who learned to speak it as a first language, one of whom is deaf. As part of an effort to regain official recognition as a federally recognized tribe, an effort to provide language instruction amongst the descendants of the original tribe and affiliated family members has begun.
The Nisenan are a group of Native Americans and an Indigenous people of California from the Yuba River and American River watersheds in Northern California and the California Central Valley. According to a 1929 archeology and ethnology press release by University of California, Berkeley, the Nisenan people are classified as part of the larger group of Native Americans known as the Maidu, though some dispute the accuracy of this relationship, including the Nisesan themselves. According to the Nisenan website, the United States' claim that they are Maidu is a misclassification and is inaccurate. As the Nisenan put it,
"Like many other Tribes throughout the United States, the Nisenan have been misidentified and mislabeled. The Nisenan have been lumped together under inaccurate labels such as "Maidu", "digger" and "southern Maidu". However, the Nisenan are a separate Tribe with their own Cultural lifeways, their own leaders and holy people, a distinct geographic territory and their own ancient and unique language."
Klamath, also Klamath–Modoc and historically Lutuamian, is a Native American language spoken around Klamath Lake in what is now southern Oregon and northern California. It is the traditional language of the Klamath and Modoc peoples, each of whom spoke a dialect of the language. By 1998, only one native speaker remained, and by 2003, this last fluent Klamath speaker who was living in Chiloquin, Oregon, was 92 years old. As of 2006 there were no fluent native speakers of either the Klamath or Modoc dialects; however, as of 2019, revitalization efforts are underway with the goal of creating new speakers.
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of "true-subapical" retroflex consonants and multiple rhotic consonants. Its script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word, voiced intervocalically and after nasals except when geminated. Tamil phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word initial.
Yawelmani Yokuts is an endangered dialect of Southern Valley Yokuts historically spoken by the Yokuts living along the Kern River north of Kern Lake in the Central Valley of California. Today, most Yawelmani speakers live on or near the Tule River Reservation.
Ingrian is a nearly extinct Finnic language of Russia. The spoken language remains unstandardised, and as such statements below are about the four known dialects of Ingrian and in particular the two extant dialects.
